By Carter B. Horsley Although its inaugural major auction of the Fall 2002 auction season was not very successful (see The City Review article of its Impressionist & Modern Art auction), Phillips de Pury & Luxembourg has a strong Contemporary Art evening auction that is bolstered by the fact that the subsequent Impressionist and & Modern Art auctions at Sotheby's and Christie's steadied the art market considerably despite definitely softer prices. This season the amount of Contemporary Art being offered by the three major auction houses is enormous and as the first such sale this Phillips auction will be very closely watched not only as a barometer of that market but also a clue to the continued viability of Phillips following its Impressionist & Modern Art auction last week that only realized about $7 million and had had a pre-sale low estimate of about $44 million. Given the generally high quality of its offerings, however, it is likely to be a successful sale. It was, indeed, extremely successful with 86.95 percent of the 46 offered lots selling, by far the best record among the major auction houses so far this season, and causing the packed saleroom to break into loud applause at the end of the sale after a less than stellar showing of Impressionist & Modern Art last week in which prices had softed by about 10 to 15 percent.
The sale total was $24,866,025, less than a $100,000 short of its pre-sale low estimate. Most of the buyers were private as opposed to dealers, according to Michael McGinnis, the head of the auction house's Contemporary Art Department, who added that 12 of the buyers were American, 22 were European and 2 were Asian. "We're very happy," he said, adding that "the market is still strong." Jeff Koons (b. 1955) is represented with two works, Lots 10 and 32. The former is entitled "Self-Portrait" and is a 37 1/2-inch-high marble bust that was executed in an edition of three with one artist's proof in 1991. The bust shows the artist's with head turned upwards with closed eyes with a rather beatific visage, his shoulders and chest resting on a very dramatic cluster of prismatic tubes pointing upwards as if exploding. Very finely modeled in unveined marble, it is an impressive and ironic play on traditional antique portrait busts with a decidedly modern sense of narcissism. It has an estimate of $1,500,000 to $2,000,000. It sold for $2,044,500 including the buyer's premium as do all the results mentioned in this article. This season the auction house raised its premium to 19.5 percent of the first $100,000 and 10 percent for any amount above $100,000.
Lot 32, "Buster Keaton," is a 65 3/4-inch high polychromed wood sculpture of the famous comic actor astride a horse. It was executed in 1988 in an edition of three with one artist's proof. Keaton here has a rather sad expression and bears something of a resemblance to the artist. It has an estimate of $1,000,000 to $1,500,000. It sold for $1,109,500. The catalogue provides the following commentary: "In 1988, when Jeff Koons introduced his Banality series, he breathed new life into the timeworn concept of the readymade. Like Marcel Duchamp and numerous Pop artists before him, Koons based these sculptures on mass-produced goods that exist in the everyday world. Unlike his predecessors, however, Koons chose to replicate objects that already functioned as art for countless middle-class Americans. As the present work demonstrates, Koons' unique conceptual maneuver dramatically expanded the boundaries of contemporary art. Like all of the artist's Banality sculptures, Buster Keaton derives inspiration from the painted wooden and porcelain knick-knacks that are sold in gift shops throughout America and ultimate reside on shelves and tabletops in typical middle-class homes. By enlarging such small collectible figurines to the dramatic dimensions of a museum masterpiece, the artist confronts his audience with their own definitions of good taste and fine art. Brilliantly blurring he boundary between valuable sculpture and cheap kitsch, Koons challenges the arbitrary distinctions that create such categories, asking why one type of object may be a sign of prestige, and the other a source of potential embarrassment."
Lot 14, "Silver Liz," by Andy Warhol (1928-1987), is a silkscreen ink, acrylic and spray paint on linen in two parts that was executed in 1963. It measures 40 by 80 inches. The right panel, with the image of Elizabeth Taylor, the movie star, was painted in 1963 and the left panel was painted in 1965. The lot has an estimate of $4,000,000 to $6,000,000. It sold for $4,409,500. The catalogue provides the following incisive and analytic commentary: "He challenged the notion of individual expression so prized by the dominant Abstract Expressionists, and, in its stead, he exalted the idea of self-as-automaton. Considered alongside his own obsession with fame and adoration, his negation of individuality, subjectivity, and self-importance is complicated if not contradicted. Moreover, Warhol's statement ['I think everyone should be a machine. I think somebody should be able to do all my paintings for me'] suggests the dismissal of agency and moral responsibility in a postwar commodity culture. Perhaps he was commenting on the impossibility of fulfilling the role of the genius artist recording his personal vision for posterity in a world where subjectivity is made obsolete by the insatiable appetite of the commodification process. Both his work and d self-made image ingeniously underscore the pursuant complacency that increasingly encumbered his own era. The early 1960s marked his launch into artworld stardom. In 1963, he appropriately christened his new studio space "The Factory" and also had his second watershed exhibition at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles, the avant-garde haven where Irving Blum first showed Warhol's silkscreen panels of consumer products and celebrities in 1962. Using an inherently technological and impersonal medium, Warhol created large-scale photo-silkscreens that exude the same contradictions and ambivalence revealed in the statement above. That images of Campbell's Soup cans were juxtaposed with images of celebrities or that such venerated personalities as Elizabeth Taylor were exhibited in assembly-line fashion is indicative of a certain collapse between person and thing, between body and disembodied. For the 1963 Ferus exhibition, Warhol made about ten Silver Liz panels, each measuring 40 by 40 inches. The near identical canvases of the Ferus series recall parts that make up a machined - objectified, fragmented, equivalent, replaceable. Both the 1962 and 1963 Ferus installations must have appeared as panoramas of mechanical parts: interchangeable, fleeting, but interestingly not productive. While the various parts that comprise a machine work together to produce something material, there is no tangible end product with the Warholian machine. The series assembled together in the gallery suggests a cadence of movement similar to the endless motion of production in an exacerbated commodity culture. Though both content and form Warhol literalizes his industrial maxim and takes Pop Art's fascination with mass culture to a much more complex and nuanced level.The garish red lipstick and bright blue smears of eye shadow hint at a sense of hysteria as they fall blatantly out of place on her slightly electric face. Many of the original Ferus-type Liz paintings, under the influence of Warhol's later ties to the New York dealer Leo Castelli, have been coupled with 'blanks' and sometimes separated again. With this Silver Liz, Warhol was surprisingly able to match the silver spray-painted background of the original canvas, creating a cohesive diptych." Most multi-canvas paintings are somewhat jarring, disjointed and gimmicky, but the blank left panel here works extremely well giving more dimension and dynamics to the work. Lot 31, "Two Multicolored Marilyns," by Andy Warhol shows two portraits of Marilyn Monroe side by side against a black background on one canvas, a different kind of diptych. The acrylic and silkscreen on canvas measures 18 1/8 by 28 inches and is inscribed on the reverse "I certify that this is an original painting by Andy Warhol completed by him in 1986 © Andy Warhol. Frederick W. Hughes." It has an estimate of $300,000 to $400,000. It sold for $449,500. Lot 28, "Crosses," is a strong abstraction by Warhol composed of 12 crosses against a black background. The synthetic polymer and silkscreen on canvas measures 90 1/8 by 70 1/2 inches and was executed in 1981-2. It has an estimate of $500,000 to $700,000. It sold for $669,500. Lot 21, "Head #3," is a bronze bust by Willem de Kooning (1904-1997) that is 18 inches high. Cast in 1973, it has a modest estimate of $250,000 to $350,000 and is a very interesting, albeit grotesque, work of great tactile power. It sold for $180,000, one of several lots that reflected low reserves.
Another de Kooning work, Lot 15, "Untitled," is an explosively colorful and very painterly abstraction. Painted in 1971, it measures 68 1/2 by 77 3/4 inches and has an estimate of $900,000 to $1,200,000. It sold for $889,500. Lot 16, "Head with Monocle," is a strong and good oil and magna on canvas by Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1997). The 36-by-30-inch work was executed in 1980 and has an estimate of $700,000 to $900,000. It sold for $669,500.
Lot 45, "Head of a Man," by Stephan Balkenhol (b. 1957) is a 149 1/2-inch high wawa wood and paint sculpture that was executed in 1992. It has an estimate of $80,000 to $120,000. It sold for $87,235. It is one of his better works and in 1992 it was mounted in the middle of the Blackfriars Bridge in London. One of most spectacular works in the auction is Lot 27, "Die Woge (The Wave)," by Anselm Kiefer (b. 1945). This 110 1/4-by-149 5/8-inch canvas, cloth, paint, tin and cotton on board was executed in 1995. It has an estimate of $400,000 to $600,000. It was one of the few works that failed to sell and was passed at $320,000. The catalogue provides the following commentary. "In order to address the moral dilemma of artistic production n post-Holocaust Germany, Anselm Kiefer rejected classical painting techniques in the early 1980s. At that point, Kiefer began using a wide range of unconventional materials in his work, allowing each substance to detonate its own inherent wealth of associations. This practice continued throughout the 19902, when the artist turned to other subjects freighte with profound moral issues and cosmic dimensions, highly charged by poetry, from such poets as Rainer Maria Rilke. In Die Woge (The Wave), for example, Kiefer deftly mixed cotton clothing, tin, and ashes to address the cabbalistic narrative of the she-demon, Lilith. An ancient Babylonian woman who figures prominently in the Bible, the Talmud, and the Cabballa, Lilith is usually portrayed as a demonic female figure who rebels against the word of God. Identified in the Cabbala as 'the first Eve' Lilith was created from the same clay as Adam and demanded to be treated as his equal. When God refused her request, Lilith denounced her creator and flew away to the shores of the Red Sea, where she became an unholy mother to all of the faithless. Despite the negative associations that typically surround the figure of Lilith, Kiefer seems to identify with this rebellious outcast, whose symbolic dresses have appeared in many of is strongest paintings in recent years."
Lot 13, "Light Switches - Hard Version," by Claes Oldenburg (b. 1929), is a painted wood, formica and metal sculpture that measures 47 3/4 inches square. Executed in 1964, it has an estimate of $500,000 to $700,000. It sold for $691,500 breaking the artist's previous auction record of $574,500. Another auction record for set for Blinky (Peter Heisterkamp) Palermo, whose "Stoffbild," Lot 23, sold for $669,600 breaking the previous record of $464,500.
Cy Twombly (b. 1928) is one of the post-war stars of the art world whose scribbled works leave some observers frigid, but Lot 22, shown above, "Untitled (Bolsena)," is perhaps the most appealing work of his to have appeared at auction in recent years. The oil-based house paint, wax crayon, and lead pencil on canvas, measures 79 by 94 3/4 inches. Executed in 1969, it has an estimate of $2,500,000 to $3,500,000. It sold for $2,869,500. This Twombly has a luscious blue-gray background with thin white horizontal lines in the center that give this work a Rothkoesque quality. The catalogue provides the following commentary: "In 1966, Cy Twombly embarked on a long series of gray paintings that are commonly considered his most daring and original works of his career. As the present canvas demonstrates, Twombly renounced the baroque flourishes of bright color that appeared in his work of the early 1960s, and instead produced spare, white scribbles on dark, muted grounds. Despite their whispering quietude, these canvases announced a dramatic break with the heritage of Abstract Expressionism. First presented to the New York art world in 1967, Twombly's gray paintings were welcomed into the cool climate of Minimalism, and presciently anticipated the rise of Conceptual art in the following decade. For obvious reasons, Twombly's gray paintings have often been referred to as 'blackboard paintings.' These large rectangular canvases, painted in deep shades of gray, green, and black, closely approximate the expansive chalkboards found in classrooms throughout the world. Fittingly, Twombly covered these dark monochromes with graphic strokes of a white wax crayon. The results often resemble handwriting exercises, the cursive efforts of a young child learning to communicate for the first time."
Lot 24, "Mit Kleinen Schwarzen Quadraten (with small black squares)," by Sigmar Polke (b. 1941), is an handsome Mondrianesque abstraction that is dispersion on beaver cloth, 59 by 50 3/8 inches. Painted in 1968, it has an estimate of $600,000 to $800,000. It failed to sell and was passed at $500,000. "In this painting," the catalogue noted, "Polke paints black squares over a checkered fabric. In their own way, these painted brushstrokes become one with the pattern of the fabric, thus the painting can also be read as a parody of abstract painting."
Gerhard Richter (b. 1932) (see The City Review of a recent retrospective exhibition on the artist) is represented in this auction by Lot 26, "Troisdorf (572-2)," a 33 1/2-by-47 1/4-inch oil on canvas. The landscape painting was executed in 1985 and has an estimate of $2,500,000 to $3,500,000." It sold for $3,199,500. Lot 29, "Untitled," is a very vibrant acrylic on canvas by Keith Haring (1958-1990). The painting measures 60 inches square and was executed in 1988. It has a modest estimate of $100,000 to $150,000. It sold for $196,500.