A $10 Million Basquiat and a $35 Million Barnett Newman Are the Latest Big-Ticket Lots Secured for the Socially Distanced Summer Auction Season

In an attempt to fight
virtual-event fatigue, auction houses are getting creative with
their summer sales—and they are securing major lots to do
it. 

Phillips announced today that a
prized Jean-Michel Basquiat work estimated at $10 million will
highlight its upcoming 20th century and
contemporary art evening sale in New York. Meanwhile, Onement V,
a Barnett Newman zip painting from 1948 (estimated at $30 million
to $40 million) will lead Christie’s ONE: A Global Sale of the 20th Century, a virtual
“relay-style” auction that will take place across four cities and
three time zones on July 10. 

The Phillips auction, on July 2,
will be live streamed and will feature a host of multimedia content
for remote bidders, including on-the-spot art-historical and market
analysis for its lots. 

The sale will be broadcast live
from Phillips’s new saleroom in London. The company’s principal
auctioneer, Henry Highley, will lead the sale in real time while a
video wall will show Phillips’s specialists on the phone with
bidders.

“We’re thrilled to bring our
marquee evening sale to collectors worldwide in a format that will
capture the intimacy and excitement of being in the room,”
Jean-Paul Engelen, Phillips’s deputy chairman and worldwide co-head
of 20th Century & Contemporary Art, says in a
statement.  

Painted in 1987, a year before
his death, Basquiat’s canvas Victor 25448 was last offered at auction in 2008, when it
went for $3.5 million at Christie’s post-war and contemporary art evening
sale. Now, Phillips is
hoping to replicate the luck it had in 2018, when it sold another major
Basquiat work, a 1984
painting titled Flexible, for $43 million—doubling the work’s low
estimate. 

Other highlights from the
Phillips sale next month include Joan Mitchell’s 1961-62
abstraction Noël (estimated at $9.5 million to $12.5
million); a never-before-offered 1921 Humpty Dumpty painting by pop-surrealist Maxfield Parrish
($400,000 to $600,000); and a 1958 ink and wash drawing by Charles
White ($700,000 to $1 million). All three artworks, as well as the
Basquiat, carry a guarantee.

The Newman work notably is not guaranteed, however, suggesting
that the seller is confident in its hefty price tag.

The live-streamed marathon sale
at Christie’s, which replaces its 20th century evening sale
originally set for next week in New York, will kick off in Hong
Kong before footage will move on to Paris, London, and, finally,
New York. Auctioneers in each location will lead their respective
sales, and pre-sale exhibitions will be held in each city.
(Policies for visiting the exhibitions will vary depending on the
regions’ respective health rules.) 

“This hybrid-format concept sale
is a way to adapt and innovate,” says Giovanna Bertazzoni,
Christie’s co-chairman of Impressionist and Modern art, in a
statement. “We feel that this event will represent the way clients
collect today.”

Newman’s Onement V was last offered at Christie’s postwar and
contemporary art evening sale in 2012, when it went for $22.4
million—cruising past its $10-15 million pre-sale
estimate.

The post A $10 Million Basquiat and a $35 Million Barnett
Newman Are the Latest Big-Ticket Lots Secured for the Socially
Distanced Summer Auction Season appeared first on artnet
News.