The Week That Was (May 16 – 23, 2008)

Will the art market’s wild ride ever end? The drama of New York's annual May evening auctions continued into last week with the revelation that Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich had been the winning bidder on both Francis Bacon's Triptych, 1976, for $86.3 million at Sotheby's, and Lucian Freud's Benefits Supervisor Sleeping (1995), for $33.6 million at Christie's. Both sales attest to the new Eastern domination of the auction room — in fact, the houses both revised their original figures, finding fewer American buyers than they'd initially counted; so much for home team advantage — with Freud having taken the prize as most expensive living artist from Jeff Koons, whose $23.5 million Hanging Heart went to the Ukrainian Viktor Pinchuk in November. The two collectors, both of whom have London homes, could next battle for the prize of ownership of the most expensive living artist on June 30, when Koons's Balloon Flower (Magenta) comes up for sale at Christie's with an estimate of $23.5 million. How many savvy purchases away from being asked to advise a fine art hedge fund is Pinchuk? Collector/dealer Charles Saatchi would know. The British former ad man will now advise the Art Trading Fund on purchases, with profits on those works going to his soon-to-open Saatchi Gallery in London. 

The week's biggest market news story came in the comparatively quieter province of American paintings, when, at Christie's New York, Thomas Moran's landscape Green River of Wyoming set a new record for a 19th-century American painting when it sold for $17.7 million against a high estimate of $5 million.

So the market likes great paintings. Houses? Not so much, apparently. Wright auctioneers put architect Louis Kahn's 1959-61 Esherick House on the block with an estimate of $2-3 million, and failed to sell it. And Richard Neutra's Kaufmann House, which Christie’s initially appeared to have sold for $16.8 million, also turned out to have been a dud when the sale was canceled.

On the world-of-ever-expanding-museums front, the Vancouver Art Gallery will move into a new building that will double its gallery space to 320,000 square feet, and Hong Kong will build a $HK 4.75 billion ($U.S. 609 million) art museum in West Kowloon. One writer questioned whether the expansion of Moscow’s Pushkin Museum and surrounding buildings — a Norman Foster project that may run up to $380 million — is a good idea, considering that some of the museum’s masterworks might eventually be subjected to claims by their original owners. “Thus diminished, what would the Pushkin display in its sprawling 428,000 square feet of exhibition space?" wrote Konstantin Akinsha in the Wall Street Journal. "Perhaps the vacant galleries could be used for the Museum of Gifts to Vladimir Putin or, in due course, to its former board chairman, President Dmitry Medvedev.”

A chip off the old block: a pair of vandals hammered off a small piece of the central stone in the ring of rocks that is Stonehenge, and made a quick getaway. A pair of telescopes — one in New York, one in London — that allow users on either side of the pond to view each other in real time have been installed by a London-based artist. What could be Van Gogh’s last painting has been sitting in a bank vault in Athens.

Artist Bill Henson's exhibition of photographs at Australia's Roslyn Oxley9 gallery had not yet opened when it was shut down by police; the public had raised objections to Henson's pictures of naked 12- and 13-year-olds. In short order, one of his models went on record defending him. In England, meanwhile, the public complained about unwrapped mummies in the Manchester Museum, and the museum dutifully covered them up.