Five-Day Photography Frenzy Kicks Off
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A five-day frenzy of photography sales launches today at Phillips de Pury & Company. In six separate sales, three auction houses will present nearly 1,000 works, estimated to bring in $25 million.
Just a few years ago, photography dealers and curators felt they were still trying to convince buyers that the field was legitimate as an art form. “I started in 1973 and we were still fighting the fight,” Peter MacGill of Pace/MacGill said. “Now I would say it’s pretty mainstream.”
Mainstream means more buyers, for everything from high-end vintage pictures to emerging Düsseldorf school Germans and rediscovered vernacular portraitists. Totals for both Christie’s and Sotheby’s at their regular April and October photography sales have increased in the past three seasons; each house took in approximately $5 million this past April, as compared with averages of $2 million to $3 million per sale in 2000-03.
Phillips, the smallest of the three auction houses, continues to compete with the two uptown behemoths in the fields of photography, design, and cutting-edge contemporary art. Last fall, it made $12.5 million with its sale of contemporary photographs from the Lambert collection. Its sale tonight and tomorrow, estimated at $4 million to $5.9 million, emphasizes breadth, taking in color-friendly conceptualists alongside established sellers such as Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, and Henri Cartier-Bresson.
“The point was to bring as catholic a view as possible,” the head of Phillips’s photography department, Rick Wester, said.
Nudes grace the back and front covers of the Phillips catalog. On the front is a 1932 print by Swiss photographer Florence Henri of a girl pinning back her hair. Coming from the collection of Ann and Jurgen Wilde, it carries an estimate of $12,000 to $18,000. On the back is photograph of a naked man scratching his head in a red room taken by William Eggleston in 1972. Estimated at $80,000 to $100,000, it is part of Mr. Eggleston’s “Greenwood, Mississippi” series.
“The gestures in both are similar,” Mr. Wester said. “And it’s a segue between vintage and contemporary.” A print of Mr. Eggleston’s most famous image, of a light bulb in a red room, is also for sale, and is estimated at $100,000 to $200,000.
Early next week, two vintage-heavy sales at Sotheby’s go up against three separate sales at Christie’s. Monday brings 34 vintage pictures to market from Florida collectors Joseph and La-Verne Schieszler at Sotheby’s, estimated at $3.2 million to $4.8 million. The single, compressed sale could match Sotheby’s totals for the past two seasons.
“They went after things that could be distilled as great prints of important images,” Sotheby’s senior vice president, Christopher Mahoney, said. Ed ward Weston and Alfred Stieglitz are well-represented. The star lot is Andre Kertesz’s “Chez Mondrian” (1926), estimated at $400,000 to $600,000. The famous image of a winding staircase and a hall table split by a doorway is printed on the carte-postale paper Kertesz liked, and mounted on vellum. According to Mr. MacGill, a “high-end, important” picture such as this could have 12 potential buyers today, as compared to about two a few years ago.
Dorothea Lange and Diane Arbus lead the multiple-owner sale at Sotheby’s the next day, which is estimated to bring in $3.9 million to $5.7 million. Lange herself gave the print of “White Angel Bread Line” (1933) to Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry, which is selling it for an estimated $200,000 to $300,000.
Sotheby’s has two different versions of Arbus’s “Exasperated Boy With a Toy Hand Grenade, N.Y.” (1962). One is estimated at $350,000 to $500,000, the other at $70,000 to $100,000; the latter was printed by Neil Selkirk well after the image was taken. In general, photographs printed posthumously or by other hands are less valuable. But the many multiples within the various sales are also instructive about the finer points of photography collecting.
“There are very few true multiples in photography,” Mr. Mahoney said. “There are always differences in condition, print quality.”
Sotheby’s is also offering seven photographs from Mr. Selkirk’s printing of an Arbus portfolio of 10 photographs, which includes the Jewish giant and the identical twins. The group is estimated at $200,000 to $300,000.A record for Arbus was set last spring when a similar, but complete, portfolio sold for $553,600 at Sotheby’s. “Portfolios are always a little bit of a gamble,” Leila Buckjune of Howard Greenberg Gallery said, “but Arbus may be an exception.”
There is room for the artist’s prices to go higher still, according to Christie’s co-director of photographs, Joshua Holdeman.
“I think Arbus is totally undervalued relative to her importance in art history,” Mr. Holdeman said, citing private sales of Arbus portfolios that have topped $1 million. Christie’s multiple owner sale on Wednesday features Arbus’s deadpan “A Family One Evening in a Nudist Camp, Pa., 1965,” for $250,000 to $350,000, as well as a rare peopleless Arbus, “Xmas Tree in a Living Room in Levittown, L.I., 1963,” estimated at $150,000 to $200,000.
The priciest lot is a complete 20-volume set of Edward S. Curtis’s ethnographic study “The North American In dian,” estimated at $400,000 to $600,000, which is attracting institutional interest, according to Mr. Holdeman. Christie’s Wednesday sale has a total estimate of $3.5 million.
On Monday, Christie’s is hosting a special sale composed of German businessman Gert Elfering’s fashion-oriented collection, which is highlighted by two Richard Avedon suites of the Beatles and includes one dye-transfer print in eye-popping psychedelic colors. Mr. Elfering, a former photographer based in London, Dubai, and Miami, clearly has an eye for the female nude, and his collection is dominated by crossover fashion photographers Helmut Newton, Irving Penn, and Peter Beard. The collection is estimated at $4 million.
Christie’s will also devote a special sale Monday to Robert Mapplethorpe’s flowers, which are estimated to bring in $1 million. Bringing together the 40 lots in the sale was a “labor of love,” said Mr. Holdeman, who previously worked for 10 years at the artist’s former gallery, Robert Miller. The flower prints were made in editions of five and seven between 1987 and 1989, as Mapplethorpe was dying from AIDS. The flowers were pliant subjects whose explosive color reaches toward both classical still-lifes and male sexual organs.
ICONIC IMAGES: THE BEST OF THE PHOTOGRAPHY SALES
Christie’s (October 10 & 12)
William Eggleston, “Huntsville, Alabama” (1969). Estimate: $50,000 to $70,000. This portrait of a man alone in a hotel room fairly defines the informal photographic sub-genre of hotel-room anomie, and Mr. Eggleston did it first.
William Henry Fox Talbot, “Oak Tree in Winter” (c. 1842-43). Estimate: $15,000 to $20,000. One of the earliest photographic images, Talbot’s tree is a striking composition, and continues to provide inspiration for contemporary artists such as Rodney Graham. The print, in good condition, is “exceedingly rare,” Christie’s co-director of photographs, Joshua Holdeman, said.
Sotheby’s (October 10 & 11)
Andre Kertesz, “Chez Mondrian” (1926). Estimate: $400,000 to $600,000. Only one other vintage print of this definitive Kertesz, also printed and mounted as the artist preferred, is believed to exist; it sits in the Art Institute of Chicago.
Frederick Sommer, “Duck Entrails, Chicken Heads” (1938). Estimate: $35,000 to $50,000. This image of a butcher’s discards is actually less gruesome than Sommer’s other tough-minded, elegantly composed pictures of a decaying foot and a placenta, both also on offer from the collection of Jon and Jaime Gipe.
Phillips de Pury (October 6 & 7)
Albert Renger-Patzsch, “Landstrasse bei Innsbruck” (1926). Estimate: $20,000 to $25,000. This is a pristine image of the open road by an essential Modernist, and comes from the private collection of German gallerists Ann and Jurgen Wilde.
Nicholas Nixon, “The Brown Sisters” (1975-2004). Estimate: $150,000 to $200,000. Thirty gelatin silver prints track the maturation of the four sisters, from boyish teens to graceful middle-aged women. Sotheby’s has another edition – 50 were made in total – minus two photos, for $80,000 to $120,000.