Van de Weghe’s 48 Hours, Nada’s Basquiat Wannabes

MIAMI—Any hint of a market slowdown was decidedly absent at New York’s Christophe van de Weghe’s stand at Art Basel, as the secondary market dealer fielded queries from a vintage Jean Prouve table.

Barely 48 hours after this fair opened, Van de Weghe had already sold at least eight works ranging from a Gerhard Richter Abstraktes Bild canvas from 1989, measuring 28 ½ by 24 inches, that went to an American collector for $950,000, to a petite Frank Stella pinstriped abstraction, Cross Pattern (1960), measuring just 12 and 1/4 inches square, which sold to a French collector for $540,000.

Other transactions included Cy Twombly’s Untitled (Val Gardena) from 1964, measuring 27 ½ by 39 inches, that sold to a Miami collector for $485,000, and Rudolf Stingel’s page-sized silver abstraction, Untitled from 1999, which went to a Monaco collector for $125,000.

Van de Weghe also placed two 20-by-16-inch Andy Warhol "Black and White" paintings from 1985 and 1986 for $185,000 each.

In addition, the dealer sold an Yves Klein sponge sculpture, WE 208 (1959), in dry blue pigment in resin on sponge, for $220,000 and an 8-by-10 inch Warhol Mao painting from 1973 for $950,000.

But Van de Weghe’s show-stopping offering, Warhol’s pristine Large Campbell’s Soup Can painting from 1964, measuring 36 by 24 inches, one of "only" five versions that exist from that period, had yet to find any takers at $8.5 million.

Meahwhile, over at Nada, blue-chip wasn’t exactly the calling card, though there was at least one excellent imitator. The artist Chris Lipomi was showing his facsimile Jean Michel Basquiat works at the booth of New York's Renwick Gallery. They were executed on torn-out pages from a 1984 book on the Olympics that the artist found, and which coincidentally matches the date of the original Basquiat drawings he was reproducing. Renwick started the fair offering 70 of the copycat pieces, but they proved to be in high demand: By the time ARTINFO arrived, they had already sold out.

Because there’s no official catalogue raisonne yet of Basquiat’s oeuvre, Lipomi combed through books and exhibition catalogues to copy the images, no doubt cribbing some unattributed fakes along the way.

The installation at Renwick paid off handsomely as the gallery sold ten individual works at $2,000 a piece, five groups of ten at $18,000 per set, and two groups of five at $9,000 a set to various wannabe-Basquiat collectors.

Lipomi views his project as a kind of athletic performance, turning out an artwork a day.

Not a bad return for a couple of months' work.

Judd Tully is editor at large for Art+Auction.