American dream
The recent New York sales were a wholly American affair
THE dominant characteristic of the art market over the past ten years has been the globalisation of collecting. From London to Los Angeles, sales that once featured work exclusively by European and American artists now include new names from India, Africa and China. Anish Kapoor, Chris Ofili and Cai Guo-Qiang are now regularly shown alongside Andy Warhol and David Hockney. And more and more buyers are also emerging from Asia, Russia, Brazil and the Middle East.
Which is one reason why the season's main auctions of post-war and contemporary art in New York on May 11th and 12th were so unusual. Bucking the trend, these were all-American moments.
The covers of the auction catalogues featured works by Mark Rothko and Jasper Johns—American artists whose painting styles and imagery are so well known they barely need to be identified by name. At the Christie's sale, the first of the two main evening auctions, three-quarters of the buyers were American. And a high-spending crowd from all over the country showed up in person: Jon Colby from Miami, Richard Rossello of the Avery Galleries in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, Michael Ovitz, a Hollywood superagent, Eli Broad, a Los Angeles philanthropist and property tycoon, Peter Brant, an east-coast newspaper magnate, David Ganek, a Wall Street hedge-fund manager, and Marc Jacobs, a trendy fashion designer.
The centrepiece of these auctions was Christie's sale of 31 works that belonged to Michael Crichton, a writer, director and creator of popular blockbusters such as “Jurassic Park”, who died in 2008. Following the auction house's success the previous week, when Pablo Picasso's 1932 “Nude, Green Leaves and Bust” sold for $106.5m (including commission and taxes), setting a new world record for a painting at auction (see article), the Crichton sale sealed Christie's current dominance of the auction business.
Every lot sold, bringing in $93.3m with record prices for work by Mr Johns and Mark Tansey.
The auction began with a small Jeff Koons lorry made of stainless steel, entitled “Jim Beam—Model A Ford Pick-Up Truck”. Bidding opened at $220,000 and quickly rose beyond the top estimate of $450,000. The work ultimately sold for $500,000 ($602,500 with commission and taxes) to Francis Outred, Christie's European head of post-war and contemporary art, who was bidding on the telephone on behalf of a private collector.
But it was lot 7, Mr Johns's “Flag” (see above), that the crowd was really waiting for. Crichton and Mr Johns were friends, and Crichton even wrote the catalogue of the Jasper Johns retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1977. Four years earlier he had bought this painting directly from the artist's private collection, a provenance that duly added to its allure.
One of a number of works Mr Johns created in the mid-1950s and early 1960s based on the American flag, Crichton's “Flag” was notable for its simplicity. Unlike the versions in the Whitney or MoMA, one of which features three layered flags while the other is wholly denuded of colour, this was the stars-and-stripes pure and simple.
With a single banner covering the canvas, the painting is easy on the eye and interesting for two particular reasons. It is worked in encaustic, an ancient technique in which pigment is mixed in liquid wax, which Mr Johns liked because it dried quickly. With the addition of bits of newspaper, the surface has a rich texture in which each individual brushmark can be clearly identified. To the viewer, it is like watching Mr Johns at work.
The painting also prefigures various shots of the American flag that have become emblematic of the 1960s, from the one that graced the stage of a Jimmy Hendrix concert in 1968 to another planted on the moon a year later. A darker reading is also available in retrospect: Mr Johns painted his flag to cover not just the front of the canvas, but the edges and corners too. How many times would those neatly folded stripes be seen on American coffins returning dead soldiers from the Vietnam war—and later from Iraq?
The pre-sale estimate for the picture had been set at $10m-15m and bidding opened at $7m with four bidders. It sold for $28.6m (including commission and taxes) to Mr Rossello, who was bidding in the room on behalf of a private client some speculated afterwards was John “Jock” Middleton from Philadelphia, a scion of the cigar-making family that owns the Philadelphia Phillies baseball team.
Larry Gagosian, Margo Leavin, Jeffrey Deitch—all well-known American dealers—went on to bid successfully for other works belonging to Crichton. “This is the most significant post-war and contemporary art collection ever sold at auction,” Christie's Amy Cappellazzo said afterwards. “It was a quintessential American sale.”