Spring art auctions show market strength

NEW YORK, May 9 (UPI) -- The art market followed the bullish lead of the stock market this week, resulting in multi-million dollar sales at Christie's and Sotheby's auction houses, including the world auction record for a sculpture.

The spring sales of Impressionist and modern works of art the first since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, which depressed the market for art, brought a total of $223.6 million. The sum was well above the auction houses' low pre-sale estimate and in the upper range of their most optimistic estimate.

The smaller sale at Christie's Tuesday was stronger in sculpture than painting and saw Constantin Brancusi's abstract bronze bust titled "Danaide," cast in 1913, fetch $18.1 million, a record for the Romanian abstract sculptor and for any work of sculpture ever sold at auction. The work sold for $10 million more than Christie's high estimate of its market value.

Margit Pogany, Brancusi's favorite model, sat for the bust, and seven were cast, six of them now in museums. The one sold at Christie's was first exhibited in New York in 1914 and was purchased by Eugene Meyer, later owner of The Washington Post, and was consigned to sale by one of his descendants.

Five bidders engaged in a pitched battle to purchase the round gilded head on a short neck, its features indicated only by arching eyebrows descending into a nose above just the hint of a mouth. The winning bid was made by telephone by an unidentified purchaser.

The top price at Sotheby's on Wednesday was $16.7 million paid for Paul Cezanne's "Pitcher and Plate of Pears," dating to 1893, after a bidding war among four bidders. It was one of a series of seven Cezanne tabletop still lifes featuring the same earthenware jug, now mostly in museums. The purchaser was Nancy Whyte, a Manhattan dealer.

"Collectors were showing passion at these sales and certainly had no qualms in investing their resources in art," observed Sotheby's Impressionist and modern expert, David Norman.

Sotheby's also had the only real disappointment of the two sales -- the failure of a large landscape, "Tahitian Women Near the Palms," by Paul Gauguin to reach its low pre-sale estimate of $15 million. It sold for only $11.5 million, possibly because of two almost ephemeral white lines across the midsection of the canvas, according to experts attending the sale.

The Gauguin had been purchased at Sotheby's by Argentine millionairess Amalia Lacroze de Fortabat for $18 million, but she had returned it to the auction block this week to help herself out of financial difficulties. Instead, she took a $5.5 million loss.

Otherwise, it was good news for most consignors. Christie's sold 33 of the 46 lots in its sale for a total of $97.6 million, and Sotheby's sold 52 of the 55 lots in its sale for a total of $126 million. Both houses badly needed successful sales to repair reputations damaged by a scandal resulting from an illegal commission-fixing conspiracy in the 1990s.

Other top prices in the Christie's sale were a record auction price of $12.6 million for a Rene Magritte painting, "Empire of Light," a twilight street scene illuminated by a street lamp, $6.3 million for Gustav Caillebotte's 1881 painting of a French infantryman titled "Soldier," and $1.9 million for an Edgar Degas bronze, "The Tub," depicting a woman reclining in her bath. Dated 1886, this bronze is considered the first modernist sculpture.

Giacometti's seven-figure bronze titled "The Forest," cast in 1950, sold for $13.2 million, well more than its $9 million estimate, and another Giacometti, "Diego in a Sweater," a bust of the artist's brother, brought $3.3 million, also above estimate.

Giacometti' "Large Head of Diego," cast in 1954, sold for $13.7 million at Sotheby's, nearly twice the high estimate. It had last sold in 1956 for $5,000.

Other Sotheby successes were Degas' famous pastel, "Mary Cassatt at the Louvre," dating to 1878, that sold in a five-way race for $16.5 million, Juan Gris' "Pot of Geraniums" (1915) a Cubist composition, that sold for $8.4 million, and Piet Mondrian's 1936 geometric abstract, "Composition in Red and White," that sold for $5.2 million. Joan Miro's "Head of a Catalan Peasant," a 1925 work, sold for $5.7 million.