Salerooms
Slave to fashion
Susan Moore
What a difference a name makes. Not the name of the artist, in this case, but that of the owner. Last week saw Sotheby's take the first but, as it turned out, not so very tentative steps towards dispersing the mod- ern and contemporary art collections formed by the late Gianni Versace. On offer were the Picassos — 20 works on paper and five paintings — a veritable biography of various muse-cum-lovers, friends and children. The problem with this particular biography, as with many another when one thinks about it, is that there were rather fewer good bits than bad.
Nonetheless, the auction house came up with some suitably gung-ho estimates, set- ting its sights at £8 million at least. In the end, the group fetched £10.8 million. It is tempting to attribute the Versace factor to the success of some of the less than impres- sive scraps of paper that exchanged hands, and to the fact that someone out there was prepared to part with a £3.3 million for a large but truly lamentable oil portrait of Dora Maar — a considerable sum but a price nonetheless indicative of its ranking as a Picasso of that size and subject. In gen- eral, the drawings fetched two or three times the amount they made at auction only six years ago — a rather wonderful pen and ink sketch of Leo Stein (Gertrude's brother) going for over three times the $18,000 it achieved in 1996.
The undisputed jewel in the Versace crown was a joyous portrait of the artist's young daughter Maya holding a toy boat. Here a bold simplification of form and exu- berant colour combine to capture some- thing close to the essence of childhood. It was a picture that Picasso kept in his own collection. Some £2 million–£3 million was expected, but six contestants bid the final price up to £3.7 million.
There was no surprise either about the price of the star lot of the evening, the £18 million paid for a superb azanne still life, 'Bouilloire et fruits' of 1888-90, which came to the block with expectations of £9 mil- lion–£12 million. The picture, which had been returned to its American owners in October after its theft in 1978, showed the artist 'grappling directly with objects, as he put it, in an attempt to produce a perfectly constructed composition. Though not quite in the class of the azanne still life from the estate of Mr and Mrs John Hay Whitney that came up in New York last year —but that did make $60.5 million — it had a com- parable intensity and brilliance of colour, the rhythms of its crumpled white cloth bril- liantly animating and unifying the whole.
Few could have anticipated the level of interest in another restitution, this time of a work which went to the Berlin National- galerie after the Nazis obliged its owner to sell his collection at auction in 1935. Van Gogh's bold, calligraphic pen and ink draw- ing of an olive grove, 'Oliviers avec des alpines au fond', dates from the summer of 1889. Its twisted boughs and the rocky out- crops beyond, caught up in Van Gogh's expressionistic, cursive line, roll across the page like tidal waves. The best pen and ink drawing by the artist to have come to the block in years (the last — smaller — one fetched $5 million), it came reasonably esti- mated at £1.5 million–£2 million. In the end, Old Master drawings dealer Katrin Bellinger, bidding on behalf of the world's richest arts institution, the Getty Museum, dropped out of the battle at £4.8 million. The drawing changed hands for a record £5.2 million (including premium) to dealer Daniella Luxembourg, bidding for a private client who will donate it in due course to the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Private clients inevitably triumph over institutions, however rich they may be. After all, they are not obliged to justify any extravagant bid to a board of trustees. The assumption must be that this particular 'private client' is none other than cosmetics heir Ronald Lauder who is not only known to admire Van Gogh — he very recently bought a drawing by the artist at Christie's — but who also happens to be chairman of MoMA's trustees. It is little wonder that MoMA should have coveted the drawing. Not only does it own a major Van Gogh painting of the same subject, but it had to give up its Van Gogh drawings to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1998, under the terms of the unusual, intelligent bequest of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller. On her death in 1948, these works on paper were to go to MoMA, of which she was a founder, for a period of up to 50 years when, no longer 'modem', they would be passed on to the Met.
It is a big price to pay, but perhaps not so big when one considers that a Van Gogh painting could cost over ten times that amount. Unlike the world of Old Masters, where drawings have become extremely 'I don't know why I bother; I'll never keep them.' expensive in relation to the price of paint- ings, the discrepancy in cost between works on paper and paintings in the Impression- ist, Post-Impressionist and Modern mar- kets is still cavernous. If we analyse recent sales, it seems to be fast diminishing. Per- haps the Versace factor is less important than we might think.
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