Photographs

NEW YORK—Collectors and dealers had a wide range of material to choose from—10 catalogues’ worth, to be exact—at the spring photography sales.

Sotheby’s opened the week on April 7 with a collection of 19th- and 20th-century works, famed for their quality and condition, from the collection of the British Virgin Islands–based investment group Quillan Company, curated by the New York dealer Jill Quasha. (Rumors circulated that “Quillan” was an amalgam of “Quasha,” “Jill” and “Allan,” Jill’s brother, something she denied to Art+Auction.) Another talking point of the sale was the withdrawal of a circa 1839 photogram of a leaf (est. $100–150,000), which experts had come to believe might have been created in the early 1790s. If so, it would fetch a significantly higher price. Of the top six lots, the New York dealer Peter MacGill bought three, including Edward Weston’s 1925 serpentine Nude (est. $600–900,000) for a record $1,609,000. “The lots were good and fairly estimated,” says MacGill.

The next day Sotheby’s sold a group of images by Weston and his son Brett, consigned by Jack Longstreth, the grandson of Weston’s sister, May Weston Seaman. A mediocre print of Edward’s marvelous Nude on Sand, Oceano, from 1936 (est. $120–180,000), made the highest price: $325,000. At the house’s various-owners sale, the San Francisco dealer Jeffrey Fraenkel bought the top lot, Diane Arbus’s A Family on the Lawn One Sunday in Westchester, N.Y., from 1968, for $553,000, well above the high estimate of $300,000.

On April 10, Christie’s had great success with its sale of a private collection of 20th-century photo­books. In a later session, of works from the German collector Gert Elfering, who focused on fashion, the most buzzed-about image was Michel Comte’s 1993 nude portrait of the Italian model Carla Bruni, now the first lady of France (est. $3,000–4,000). In front of hordes of cameras and after furious bidding, the picture sold for $91,000 to a Chinese collector (who could have bought one of Pamela Hanson’s photographs of a topless Bruni for just $2,000 to $3,000 at the New York dealer Bonni Benrubi’s booth at the AIPAD fair that week.) At that evening’s auction of Arbus images from the collection of the divorcing Hollywood couple Bruce and Nancy Berman, every lot sold. An American dealer paid the highest sum, $115,000, for Child Selling Plastic Orchids at Night, N.Y.C., 1963 (est. $30–50,000).

A record was set for Henri Cartier-Bresson at the Christie’s various-owners sale on April 11, when an American collector purchased his Hyères, France, 1932 (est. $60–90,000) for $265,000. But it was the auction of Ansel Adams images, consigned by court order by the failing company Fremont Mortgage of San Francisco, that was the house’s most surprising success, as fears that the sale would glut the market proved unfounded. The bidding was fast and furious, despite numerous condition problems, mostly on the mounts. The top lot was a mural print of one of Adams’s finest landscapes, Clearing Winter Storm, Yosemite Valley, 1944 (est. $250–350,000), which sold for $481,000.

Phillips’s auctions were its second under New York head of photographs Joseph Kraeutler, formerly the director of the Condé Nast Archive. The total for part one of the dealer and photographer Gerd Sander’s “Corbeau et Renard” collection, named after the fable by Jean de la Fontaine, fell far below the guarantee, but results were expected to be better for part two, which took place in London on May 17. Another setback for Phillips was the 11th-hour withdrawal of more than 20 photographs taken by Arbus in the 1950s of Hubert’s Museum, a freak show and flea circus. Officially, this was done because the original owner of the material was threatening a lawsuit against the consignor to whom he had sold the collection. But there is a rumor that Phillips’s chairman, Simon de Pury, had simply feared the sale would not meet its guarantee. At press time, however, Phillips representatives were upbeat about negotiations for a private sale.

Closing out the week was Phillips’s painfully lackluster various-owners sale, which brought in just $1,739,550, against an estimate of $2.2 million to $3.3 million.

"Auction Reviews: Photographs" originally appeared in the June 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's June 2008 Table of Contents.