Art market stumbles toward normalcy

[FREDERICK M. WINSHIP, UPI Senior Editor]

NEW YORK (UPI) -- The recession-battered art market continued its slow
and sometimes tricky climb back to normalcy with an auction at Sotheby's
gallery that brought a surprising $13.7 million for the only major Henri
Matisse cutout painting ever to come up at public sale.
The Wednesday night auction totaled $48.5 million, well below the
pre-sale estimate of $57 to $79 million, with 18 of the 56 Impressionist
and Modern works on the block failing to sell. One of the failures was
another Matisse, a tabletop still life, which had been expected to fetch
as much as $3 million.
A Tuesday sale of Impressionist and Moderns at Sotheby's rival house,
Christie's, saw 15 of 60 works offered fail to sell.
The Christie's sale total was $51.3 million, seriously off the pre-
sale estimate of $61 million to $79.5 million, but one lot, a pastel of
ballerinas by Edgar Degas, brought $7 million, way above estimate.
The vagaries of the recovering market prevented a return to the boom
level of 1988 but some of the prices at Sotheby's were exceptional. The
large Matisse cutout, a joyous 1951 abstract titled ``The Wine Press,''
had carried a pre-sale evaluation of only $10 million.
``We saw strong prices for strong works,'' said Diana Brooks,
president of Sotheby's. ``We do believe we're on our way back.''
The Matisse that failed to sell, ``Tin Pot, Lemon and Chair'' painted
in 1939, was last sold in 1990 at the Henry Ford 2d sale for $3.8
million, but bidding never got beyond $1.5 at Sotheby's, below the
reserve price put on it by the consignor.
Another disappointment was the failure of Braque's magnificent cubist
painting dating from 1913, ``Violin and Glass'' to find a buyer willing
to go above the reputed $6 million reserve. Bidding stopped at $4.8
million and thus it did not sell. It had been estimated to bring as much
as $8 million.
The sale's successes included Pierre-Auguste Renoir's ``The
Laundresses,'' a idyllic 1912 work which sold for $4.9 million, Egon
Schiele's ``Lovers (Man and Woman),'' a powerful 1914 oil that sold for
$4.7 million, and Paul Cezanne's 1887 ``Still Life, Saucer and Fruit,''
$3.5 million.
Camille Pissarro's 1872 ``Road, Winter Sun and Snow,'' was sold to
Swiss billionaire collector Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza, for
$2.2 million, well above the $1.6 million estimate. Another Pissarro
sold at Christie's for $3.9 million, also above estimate, making
Pissarro a hot item in the Impressionist market.
The two-week series of sales at the two auction houses continued
Thursday at Sotheby's with the scheduled sale of 88 paintings,
sculptures, drawings and ceramics by Pablo Picasso from the collection
of Stanley J. Seeger, an American living in Switzerland.
Some of Seeger's Picassos are expected to bring less than he paid for
them during the art boom of the 1980s but many he bought at the
beginning of the decade probably will bring the collector a profit,
according to David Nash, Sotheby's modern art expert.
``At the end of the day, he'll probably break even,'' Nash predicted.
Altogether, 11 sales of hundreds of paintings, sculptures,
watercolors and drawings are expected to total more than $200 million.