Klimt paintings looted by Nazis to be sold at Christie's, including four of five oil paintings by Gustav Klimt and a portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, were set to be offered by Christie’s with the works possibly being auctioned or sold privately. The paintings, which had been restituted to the Bloch-Bauer family after a legal battle, were on display at the Neue Galerie and LA County Museum of Art before Ronald Lauder purchased the Bloch-Bauer portrait for a reported $135 million.
Gustav Klimt paintings from Austria that had been returned to the heiress are to be sold in autumn. Christie's president Marc Porter commented to the New York Times that it is unclear whether they will be auctioned or sold privately. The five Klimt works were handed to Maria Altmann in Los Angeles and have been exhibited at Lauder's Neue Galerie in New York; Ronald Lauder purchased Adele Bloch-Bauer I for 135 million dollars, the highest price ever paid for a painting.
Carol Vogel discusses Adam D. Sender’s art collection and an upcoming Phillips, de Pury & Company auction, mentioning artists Richard Prince, Andreas Gursky, and Mike Kelley along with related guarantees and past auction comparisons.
Wassily Kandinsky’s 1931 painting Coulant, oil and mixed media on panel, sold at Aguttes Auction House’s sale of Nineteenth and Twentieth Century paintings at Drouot-Richelieu, achieving $2,481,848; the day’s total sales were $7,678,728 for 296 lots with over 400 bidders. The work is from Kandinsky’s Bauhaus period and reflects shifts away from Constructivism and Suprematism.
Kultur: Zurückgewinngemeinschaften discusses Ernst-Ludwig Kirchner's Berliner Straßenszene, restituted to heirs of Alfred Hess and its sale at Christie’s in New York; mentions Klimt paintings returned to Jewish heirs and Menzel’s Afternoon in the Tuileriegarten restituted from Dresden to the London National Gallery; explores roles of auction houses and law firms in restitution and provenance research, with Christie’s and Sotheby’s profiled.
The National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa returned a painting by Edouard Vuillard, Le Salon de Madame Aron, to a French family after evidence showed it was taken by the Nazis. The work, an oil on paper purchased in 1956 from Galerie Dubourg in Paris, was returned to descendants of Alfred Lindon and his son Jacques; Jacques initially refused the painting, and provenance research confirmed ownership by the Lindon family during the 1940 occupation.
The Archibald Prize winning portrait of David Gulpilil by Craig Ruddy sold for 312,000 Australian dollars at a Sydney auction, double the estimate. A Brett Whiteley work, Hummingbird and Frangipani, sold for 2.04 million Australian dollars, a record price for a Whiteley and the third-highest for an Australian painting.
Whiteley’s record haul reports that Brett Whiteley’s four-metre-long painting Hummingbird and Frangipani (1988) sold for 2.04 million at Sotheby’s Sydney, setting a record price for an Australian artist; Craig Ruddy’s Archibald-winning portrait of David Gulpilil sold for 312,000, while John Brack’s The Bar and Frederick McCubbin’s Bush Idyll fetched 3.12 million and 2.3 million respectively.
Cottone Auctions reports a top sale of $1,001,000 for James McNeill Whistler’s marine oil Violet and Blue: Among the Rollers, sold at Cottone’s auction; the sale total for the 240 lots was $2.5 million. The painting, formerly missing for over a century, was purchased by art dealer Thomas Colville on behalf of the Detroit Institute of Arts.
Police recover The Scream and Madonna, two paintings stolen from the Munch Museum in Oslo in August 2004, with the recovery announced by Norwegian police and the works undergoing authentication and examination.
Modigliani’s Portrait of Picasso, 1915, is on view at the Royal Academy in London and has been bought by a Russian collector in the last 12 months; the painting was previously described as a loan from Galerie Schmidt, Paris, and later as on loan from a private collection in Moscow. Manuel Schmidt confirms a sale to a Russian client in November last year, but price is not disclosed. The highest recorded auction price for a Modigliani male portrait is $3.1 million for Portrait of Paul Guillaume, 1916, at Christie’s New York in November 1996.