Modern Masters Suffer at Auction

By CAROL VOGEL
Picasso and Giacometti were magical names a year ago, but at Sotheby’s on Tuesday night, works by these artists went unsold. That included a 1938 Picasso portrait that decorated the cover of the sale’s catalog and was being sold by a victim of Bernard L. Madoff, hoping to raise cash.

What did tempt the packed salesroom were well-priced, pretty Impressionist images from a celebrated New York collection that had been lent to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for years.

The sale kicked off a spring auction season that was far diminished from years past both in number of works and value. On Tuesday, Sotheby’s cobbled together a sale with just 36 works, estimated to bring at least $81.5 million. They actually brought far less: $61.3 million.

And that sum was modest compared with six months ago, when 45 lots totaled $223.8 million.

(Final prices include the commission paid to Sotheby’s: 25 percent of the first $50,000; 20 percent of the next $50,000 to $1 million; and 12 percent of the rest. Estimates do not reflect commissions.)

This spring had been Picasso’s season. Besides an exhibition of his late works at the Gagosian Gallery in Chelsea, which has drawn thousands of visitors since it opened in March, Sotheby’s and Christie’s each put a painting by Picasso on the cover of their Impressionist and modern art sale catalogs, and both sellers were said to be Madoff victims.

At Sotheby’s, William Achenbaum, who runs the Gansevoort Hotel Group and who lost money with Mr. Madoff, was said to be the seller of “The Artist’s Two-and-a-Half-Year-Old Daughter With a Boat,” a 1938 Picasso canvas depicting his daughter Maya holding a toy boat. (The Madoff effect will be felt at Christie’s on Wednesday night, when another Picasso, also on the cover of the sale catalog, is offered by another Madoff victim, Jerome Fisher, a founder of the footwear company Nine West.)



The Sotheby’s painting was expected to bring $16 million to $24 million. One bidder tried to get it cheap but couldn’t get it cheap enough, and the work went unsold. That it was one of the biggest flops of the night was not a surprise. The painting had been offered around privately before the auction, and afterward dealers said it was overpriced.

The other big-ticket item — and another casualty of the evening — was “The Cat,” a bronze sculpture by Alberto Giacometti. Made in 1951 and cast in 1959 in an edition of eight, it was expected to bring $16 million to $24 million, but aside from two bottom feeders, nobody wanted to take the cat home. As with the Picasso, the auction house had tried unsuccessfully to sell the sculpture privately for a higher price than the estimate earlier this year.

But the evening was not without a few high points. Mondrian’s “Composition in Black and White, With Double Lines,” a 1934 canvas, was estimated at $3 million to $5 million. It brought the highest price of the evening, selling to an unidentified bidder sitting in the back of the salesroom for $9.2 million.

Before the auction, dealers expressed concerns about the condition of the composition, which was at a restorer until right before the sale. But that did not seem to matter. Six bidders vied for the work, and some attributed its popularity to the Yves Saint Laurent effect: the memory of three other Mondrians that were among the highlights of the sale of art and objects belonging to Saint Laurent and his partner, Pierre Bergé, at Christie’s in Paris in February. One Mondrian from that collection, a 1922 canvas, brought $24.5 million and was said to have been purchased by the Louvre museum in Abu Dhabi.

Perhaps the biggest surprise of the evening was the enthusiasm buyers had for Impressionist paintings.

Three were from the estate of Marian Kingsland Frelinghuysen, an heir of Henry O. and Louisine Waldron Elder Havemeyer, celebrated collectors who left a portion of their collection — prime examples of masters like Degas, Cassatt, Courbet, Manet and Monet — to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1929.

Six bidders fought for Monet’s “Sailboat on the River Seine, Argenteuil,” from 1872. An early landscape, it ended up going to the Nahmad Gallery, with spaces in New York and London, for $3.4 million, nearly twice its high $1.8 million estimate.

Also from the same estate were two paintings by Pissarro. “The Goat Keeper,” a peasant woman feeding a goat, was estimated at $1.4 million to $1.8 million. Four people went for the painting, which was sold to a telephone bidder for $2.5 million. “Flood in Pontoise” (1882), a landscape depicting the rising water from the river Oise, was bought by another telephone bidder for $2.9 million.

Canvases by Tamara de Lempicka are plentiful this season, and a group of them were being sold at Sotheby’s from the collection of Wolfgang Joop, a German fashion designer.

A record price for the artist was set for a classic Art Deco canvas, “Portrait of Marjorie Ferry,” a 1932 image of a cabaret singer posed topless and draped in gray folded drapery. Estimated at $4 million to $6 million, it was bought by a telephone bidder for $4.8 million.

After the sale, as the crowd was trying to make sense of the evening’s results, Lionel Pissarro, a Paris dealer who is a great-grandson of the artist Camille Pissarro, said: “Sotheby’s readjusted Impressionist prices thinking they wouldn’t have the buyers. They didn’t do that for modern masters and the results were just the opposite.”