Flash News

Every fortnight, Artprice provides a short round up of art market news.

Flowers in winter at the Musée Delacroix (Paris)

To celebrate the refurbishment of its garden, the Eugène DELACROIX National Museum is hosting an exhibition of flower paintings and watercolors by the artist from 12 December to 18 March 2013. The show will have a special focus on Delacroix’s five bouquet paintings presented at the 1849 Salon and includes various works loaned from private collections and public museums in Europe and the United States. The institution, which occupies the artist’s former home in the Rue de Furstenberg in Paris, will also be comparing some twenty works by the master to paintings by Johan CRETEN and Jean-Michel OTHONIEL to illustrate “the permanence of floral inspiration”. Indeed, these two Contemporary artists are regularly in the limelight: in 2011, Othoniel participated in the My Way exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, a show that explored the boundaries between the organic and natural worlds. Meanwhile, works by Johan Creten were presented at the Hong Kong International Art Fair.
Delacroix’s floral representations, which are rare at auctions, can generate surprise results: his watercolor Etude d’anémone fetched nearly $ 120,000 last year, equivalent to forty times its low estimate (Audap-Mirabaud, Paris, 22 June 2011)!

The Museum of Everything or “Art Brut” in Paris

A disused school, with 500 works created by exceptionally free-minded artists: this is the somewhat daring challenge that Chalet Society (an association created by Marc-Olivier Wahler, former Director of the Palais de Tokyo in Paris) is offering until February 2013 in Paris. The works from the James Brett collection are the products of self-taught artists, sometimes interned in a psychiatric hospital, often inhabited by a tenacious obsession. These works will inhabit the old classrooms and corridors of the old Catholic seminary in Paris, after attracting 350,000 visitors in London, Turin and Moscow.
Henry J. DARGER, the primary pillar of this exhibition, has even been offered at Christie’s. While the 11th annual fair of Art Brut was open to the public, the New York auctioneer sold While inside they await developments they are cleverly Outwitted for $75,000 (27 January 2003). Further evidence that demand is increasingly strong among collectors for the key figures of Art Brut: Séraphine DE SENLIS recently signed a superb auction record with her painting, Pommier, which fetched more than $260,000 at Artcurial in Paris on 30 May 201). This is nevertheless still a long way behind Jean DUBUFFET, father of Art Brut, whose auction record stands at $ 5.4m since the sale of Trinité-Champs-Elysées at Sotheby’s New York in 2009.

The Raphael drawing sold by Sotheby’s reaches records

In a previous communiqué (7 September 2012), we announced the sale of a RAPHAEL drawing by Sotheby’s on 5 December 2012. Considering the quality of the work and the rarity of works proposed by the old master, we suggested that it could well fetch a dizzying result.
In effect, this study in black chalk elicited furious bidding, pushing the final hammer price to $42.7m, double the high estimate. This is a new record in pounds sterling for the artist, whose previous record was generated by Head of a muse, dated from 2009 (Christie’s, London). We will probably have to wait several years before another piece of this quality comes along to dethrone the result fetched by this Head of a Young Apostle.

Anish Kapoor at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney

Anish KAPOOR is honored in Australia for the first time with a major exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney. The Indian artist is known for his monumental sculptures, which offer viewers a new perspective on their cultural environment. For example, he created the famous Cloud Gate installed at Chicago’s Millennium Park. From 20 December 2012 to 1 April 2013, he will set up his impressive works in the two-storey Australian Museum.
Anish Kapoor’s rise on the auction market has been dazzling with a price index multiplied by 13 in just 13 years! His sculptures are eagerly snapped up at auctions: they represent 95% of his turnover and have generated no less than 19 million-plus results! His auction record, struck for the Untitled work carved from a block of alabaster, stands at $3.5m (Sotheby’s London, 01 July 2008). However, fans of Anish Kapoor’s work should not lose hope of acquiring a work within a budget capped at $10,000: the artist produces object-sculptures in ceramic that sell for affordable prices (from $2,000), as well as superb prints usually limited to 20 copies (for between $1,000 and $2,000).