By Carter B. Horsley The unquestioned star of this Contemporary Art auction is "Michael Jackson and Bubbles," a sparkling homage by Jeff Koons to the famous pop singer and his pet monkey, shown above.
The porcelain ceramic sculpture is numbered 3/3 from an edition of 2 plus an artist's proof. The other sculptures are in the Dakis Joannou Collection Foundation in Athens, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Broad Art Foundation in Santa Monica, California.
Over the past few seasons, Koons's art has been escalating in value at auction and this lot has an ambitious estimate of $3,000,000 to $4,000,000. It sold for $5,615,750 including the buyer's premium as do all results mentioned in this article. The astronomical price easily shattered the artist's previous world auction record of $1,817,500 to an anonymous buyer.
The auction's sales total was $45,312,400 and 75.71 percent of the 70 offered lots sold. While the buy-in rate was a bit high, the prices for many works were strong and Tobias Meyer, the auctioneer noted after the sale that the auction room was lively. There was considerable bidding in the room and a strong European presence.
Koons has proven to be an exceedingly versatile artist who has had an uncanny ability to pick subjects of great charm and humor such as his shiny and reflective, balloon-like "Rabbit," or his Pink Panther and Friend porcelain or his huge botanical "Puppy," as well as less-family-oriented subjects such as a large painting of himself engaged in a sex act. Apart from his mirthfulness, Koons's kitsch subjects straddle the line between low- and high-brow as well as Andy Warhol's soup can paintings and some will probably hope he will decide to make movies too as they probably anticipate that his glossed-finishedness will be equally dazzling, or awesome, or jaw-dropping, or whatever. It is very hard not to like much of Koons's work even if one is not certain it is great art. He is a slick showman with a fine "eye," a grand "Me Generation" popularizer, and "art," especially "contemporary" art, however disturbing or raw, is not always entertaining.
While the Koons lot is the obvious attention-grabber in this auction, it is not likely that Lot 26, a fine example of the "Ocean Park" series of paintings by Richard Diebenkorn (1922-1993) will be overlooked as it is one of the best works being offered in the Contemporary/Post War round of auctions this season by Sotheby's, Christie's and Phillips de Pury & Luxembourg. "Entitled "Ocean Park No. 67," it is an exquisite oil on canvas that measures 100 by 81 inches and was painted in 1973. Formerly in the collection of Mr. and Mrs. Donald B. Marron of New York and Steve Martin of Los Angeles, it has a conservative estimate of $2,500,000 to $3,500,000. It sold for $3,525,750.
Diebenkorn (see The City Review article on the Diebenkorn exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art) began his "Ocean Park" series in 1967. The catalogue describes the series as "monumental, airy, almost geometric abstractions" and notes that "Because of their delicate transparency, the colors are seen more in terms of process than result." Discussing his redrawing of lines and layering of colors, the catalogue's essay on the lot states that "Diebenkorn shifts them as he constructs the composition, leaving ghost marks, pentimenti, to make the canvas a record of old ideas, of grand schemes hatched and forgotten, of hints of what might have been; and yet the final, last solution, the topmost layer, lays claim to a restful, seemingly inevitable solution."
Whereas Christie's has several very good works in different styles by Gerhard Richter (b. 1932) in its Post-War auction this week (see The City Review article on the Post-War evening auction May 16, 2001 at Christie's), this auction offers yet another dimension to his oeuvre with Lot 32, "Drei Kerzen," a 49 ¼-by-59 ½-inch oil on canvas that was executed in 1982. The painting of three lit candles against a dark background has been consigned from the Collection of Camille Oliver-Hoffmann and has an ambitious estimate of $4,000,000 to $6,000,000. It sold $5,395,750, breaking the previous world auction record for Richter of $4,956,000.
The catalogue provides the following commentary on this lot:
"Arguably, more than any other artist, Richter has developed the art of painting; blurring the boundaries between form and content, between Sign and Signifier on the canvas. Richter's concern was not so much how to make marks, but why one should develop such marks in the context of an antagonism between representation and re-presentation. The only reality was not the image, but the process. For Richter, painting became an ethereal exploration, with the canvas as the laboratory; his tools thus became the means to conjure some of the most magical images of this period.The dialogue between painterly abstraction and romanticized realism related to photography is best exemplified in the series of 32 works depicting skulls and candles, executed by Richter between 1982 and 1983. Drei Kerzen, the largest of these examples and the only canvas to depict three candles, must be seen as a seminal work in Richter's oeuvre. Like Rembrandt's famous etching of the three trees, the candles, combined with Richter's delicious interplay of light and shade, is reminiscent of the Crucifixion scene. This sense of fate links the Candle paintings to the Romantic overtones first expressed in Richter's Nature paintings at the end of the1960s.Richter's Drei Kerzen, cannot therefore be read literally as a Still Life. The image becomes the vehicle for a more interesting investigation into the veracity of `realistic images', and an exploration into the role of light in painting.the present work is a masterpiece of tonal interplay. The fluid, liquid brushwork, so tightly controlled by Richter, is mesmerizing. This wonderfully poised and precise canvas, executed with a stunning refinement of technique and a rare impact of vision, stands out as a masterpiece."
This auction is also highlighted by good works by Warhol (1928-1987), Mark Rothko (1903-1970), Franz Kline (1910-1962), Adolph Gottlieb (1903-1974), Jackson Pollock (1912-1956), Joseph Cornell (1903-1972) and Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988).
Lot 49, "Black and Red on Red," is a nice, relatively small-size Rothko, oil on paper, 29 5/8 by 21 5/8 inches, that is dated 1962 and has an estimate of $1,000,000 to $1,500,000. It sold for $1,545,750.
Lot 19, "Group of Five Campbell's Soup Cans," is a 16-by-20-inch synthetic polymer and silkscreen ink on canvas, shown above, that is dated 1962 and has an ambitious estimate of $2,500,000 to $3,500,000. It sold for $3,745,750. It was formerly in the collections of Leon Mnuchin of New York and Karl Ströher of Darmstadt. The catalogue maintains that the artist, who eat soup for lunch for 20 years, used "an opaque projector to trace his images during this time, and this was the case" with this work. "This process of hand-tracing a projected image would lead directly to Warhol's first photo-silkscreens of late 1962 and for years to follow. Thus, Group of Five Campbell's Soup Cans stands as a pivotal piece in Warhol's body of work.
Lot 50, "Liz as Cleopatra," is a 31-by-18 1/8-inch synthetic polymer and silkscreen ink on canvas that is dated 1962 and has an estimate of $600,000 to $800,000. It sold for $665,750.
Lot 47, "Untitled," is an excellent oil on canvas, 54 by 28 inches, by Kline that was painted in 1953. This bold black and white abstraction has a modest estimate of $600,000 to $800,000. It sold for $775,750.
Lot 44, "Low Land," is an unusual and striking work by Gottlieb. The 48-by-90-inch oil on canvas was executed in 1971 and has a conservative estimate of $120,000 to $180,000. It sold for $104,250. Whereas most of his major works are vertical, and have white backgrounds and centered compositions, this painting is horizontal and has a light blue-green background and confines most of its composition to the lower half of the painting. It is lovely, subtle and striking.
Lot 24, "Black and White/Number 6, 1951," is a 56 1/8-by-45 ¼-inch enamel on canvas by Pollock (see The City Review article on a recent Pollock exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York) that has an ambitious estimate of $6,000,000 to $8,000,000. It sold for $7,980,750.
"Most extraordinary in the series of black paintingswas the re-emergence of figuration. Pollock refused to subscribe to abstraction as a dogmatic imperative, as many critics of the time did. Instead, he sought a space between figuration and literal abstraction in order to advance his work. Of all the black paintings, this is perhaps one of the richest and darkest, filled with repeated passages of enamel, pooled to form deep blacks, and then dragged and scratched to create dry half-tones. Luxurious textures permeate these passages of the upper right of the canvas, while a wet arabesque pours out in a finely controlled line twisting in upon itself in the lower left. One can't help but imagine the lines as the contours of organic forms heads, fingers, legs, or arms.Cy Twombly's dried lines, both abstract and figurative, scratched across the canvas seem indebted to these black paintings. Brice Marden's calligraphic lines and even Frank Stella's black paintings, can be said to approach Pollock through these late works."
Lot 40, "Untitled," is a nice, small work by Cornell that is a 12 ¾-by-9-by-4 ¾-inch mixed media box construction with stuffed bird and electric light. Executed circa 1955, it has an estimate of $200,000 to $250,000. It failed to sell and was passed at $150,000.
Lot 25, "Avatar," is a lovely and great, surrealistic, 78-inch-high bronze sculpture by Isamu Noguchi that was originally conceived in 1947 and executed in pink Georgia marble in the Kröller-Muller Museum in Otterlo and then cast in an edition of 8 in bronze between 1979 and 1986. This one was cast in 1986. It has a modest estimate of $600,000 to $800,000. It sold for $610,750.
Lot 48, "Mortality," is another fine, 75-inch-high bronze sculpture by Noguchi that was once in the Lambert Collection in Belgium. It is number two of six casts executed from 1961 to 1988 and has an estimate of $300,000 to $400,000. It sold for $313,750.
Lot 31, "X Crib," is a painted wood sculpture, shown above, by Robert Gober (b. 1954) that is 44-by-50 ½-by-33 ¼ inches and was executed in 1987. Gober has taken the traditional rectangular baby's crib and constructed one that consists of two triangular sections facing each other. The lot has an estimate of $400,000 to $600,000. It sold for $423,750.
"Bearing traces of its manual production, traces of physical contact and bathed in the `timeless' warm white patina that often accompanies objects of comfort," the catalogued observed, "X Crib takes the Minimalist form and lends it an uncanny terror which silently penetrates the viewer's subconscious. Playing with the received perception of the ideal crib as the harmonious bodily comfort zone and the secure locus of unity, Gober's twisted, tortured childhood cage articulates a physical and emotional confinement which somehow hints at an innocence lost and lends a sculpture form to the world of lived experience. This mute object, this silent thing has suddenly become a replica of a specific feeling, a testimony to a domestic tragedy."
Perhaps the most controversial lot in the auction is 5, "No," a self-portrait color photograph, 38 by 20 inches, by Charles Ray (b. 1953), number two of an edition of four, shown in the photograph above at left, as it has a very ambitious estimate of $400,000 to $600,000 and is the illustration of the catalogue's back cover. It failed to sell and was passed at $350,000. "Ray's image in No is a realistic fiberglass mold of his head and hands, painted in lifelike tones," the catalogue noted.