Modern Masters Give FIAC a Boost

Christopher Wool George Condo Rachel Whiteread Alexander Calder Andy Warhol Pablo Picasso Constantin Brancusi Cindy Sherman

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No other art fair comes close to match the grandeur of the Grand Palais, also the site of the $483.8 million Yves Saint Laurent/Pierre Bergé auction last February.

The fair added a new section this year, “A Joint Presentation of Modern Masterworks,” also known as “The Modern Project.” The brainchild of leading Paris dealer Daniel Malingue, the chicly designed, segregated section comprises 10 blue-chip galleries each highlighting two or three modern masterworks, ratcheting up the quality of the fair’s offerings and smartly setting it apart from London’s Frieze Art Fair, which ended Sunday.

But the real purpose, according to Malingue, who organized the subsection and is showing in it himself, along with nine colleagues who are new to FIAC, “is to take some good things away from auction.”

“That is my hope,” he said. “To present works just like Christie’s and Sotheby’s do.”

Malingue envisions taking the new enterprise to different dramatic settings every six months, “so a seller will come to me and say, ‘I’d like to put my fabulous Mondrian in your exhibition.” And in fact, his vision is already becoming reality: The government of Abu Dhabi invited the 10 exhibitors to show at next month’s Abu Dhabi Art fair there.

Among the jewels in “The Modern Project” were Pablo Picasso’s Femme Escrivant (Marie-Therese) (1934), priced in the region of $24 million at Chicago’s Richard Gray Gallery; Constantin Brancusi’s Madamoiselle Pogany I (1913) in polished bronze with a limestone base, going for in the $35 million range at New York’s L&M Arts; and a stunning untitled Alexander Calder stabile from 1942 in wood, wire, glass, and string, at New York’s PaceWildenstein, priced around $6–8 million.

“We already have reserves on the Sam Francis to a German collector for four million Swiss francs” said Catherine Couturier of Basel’s Galerie Beyeler about Way Then Opened II (1962–63), “and we have a reserve on our Fernand Leger, Le Drapeau from 1919, at six million Swiss francs.”

The elaborate installation generated the main buzz at the fair, with people guessing what Gagosian Gallery might be asking for Andy Warhol’s Green Disaster (Green Disaster Twice) (1963) or how much Frantisek Kupka’s Architecture Philosophique (1914) was going for at Paris’s Galerie Louis Carré.

As for the reception of the new, higher-end section, all early indicators make it a hit. “You’re seeing here potentially the best of the market, and who doesn’t want to see that?” says New York art adviser Sandy Heller. “It’s a brilliant effort to make this fair a permanent stop on the art trail.”

But the Modern section was a kind of fancy sideshow than a main attraction.

The main portion of the fair felt like the Arctic, with people walking around with the collars turned up to the chilly Paris air under the Grand Palais’s glass-and-cast-iron dome, but that didn’t impede trading (or gossip, particularly the news that Paris's Wildenstein Institute, creator of many catalogues raisonné of important Impressionist and modern artists, had forced at least eight researchers to resign and shuttered its Gazette des Beaux Arts).

New York’s Luhring Augustine had dedicated its entire stand to British sculptor Rachel Whiteread, and had almost immediately sold one of her 2009 works, Hive, in cast resin, to a prominent American collector for €215,000.

There was also a frenzy of early transactions at New York’s Skarstedt Gallery, a FIAC newcomer, with two works selling for €1 million: Christopher Wool’s If You (1992–2005) in enamel on aluminum, and Cindy Sherman’s color centerfold Untitled #93 (1981).