100 Top Treasures
November 2007
Producing the annual 100 Top Treasures list is more than reporting on and writing about the best art objects that have been sold or donated over a year’s time (July 2006–June 2007). For David Masello, Dick Kagan and Doris Goldstein, New York correspondents who have served as our Top Treasures team for five years, researching and compiling this list is an experience filled with all the drama that is the nature of our passion—collecting fine and decorative arts.On the following pages, we hope to inspire and enlighten you through the objects we have selected for our "collection." Though numbered for logistics, any of the following 100 items can be a No. 1 in our opinion. Our reporters, too, have their favorites. "I’ve come to feel almost proprietary about the objects we’ve written about," says Masello. "When I went to the Frick Collection to see the ‘Pietà with Two Putti Angels’ [12], I scolded two over-zealous tourists who were getting too close to the sculpture with their big dangling purses." The bidding war for the bronze figure of Artemis (20) captivated Goldstein, who as a veteran auction reporter appreciates a heated sale. "The realized price was four times the $7 million high estimate. A surprise?" she posits. "No. Two dealers, both with their heels dug in, sparred until one conceded. The sale had all the elements of great theater." And like any collecting pursuit, there’s always that one treasure that missed being added to the assemblage. For Kagan, it was a Lalique perfume bottle that sold for a record $216,000 at David Rago Auctions, in Lambertville, N.J., which did not make the final list. "A young man paid a then-princely $50 for it in 1939 and gave it to his wife, who kept it 65 years," Kagan says. "It was as much an item of enduring love as a rare artifact."
1 Architect’s Archive
During the 1970s, while Pierre Koenig was designing prefabricated homes for residents of California’s Chemehuevi Indian Reservation, he learned something about natural air conditioning. Koenig told his students at the University of Southern California School of Architecture that the "passive-ventilation systems" typical of the teepees of the Plains Indians were perfect examples of "prefabrication and conforming to the environment at a small cost! We haven’t yet been to able to achieve this in modern technology." Even though he celebrated—and exploited to their fullest—the chief materials of the Modernist architectural palette (steel and glass), Koenig often advised, "Don’t put too much confidence in mechanical systems. They fail. Far better to build in concert with nature in the first place." Of his many architectural accomplishments, Koenig is best known for his Case Study houses No. 21 and No. 22, built in 1959 and 1960. The original working drawings for those now iconic (and extant) residences in Los Angeles are among the 3,000 objects and items of ephemera included in his architectural archive, acquired in December by the Special Collections of the Research Library at the Getty Research Institute. Although the Getty won’t put a value on the archive, it is revealing to note that Koenig’s Case Study houses continue to sell in excess of $3 million—ironic considering that they were meant to be solutions for affordable housing in their day. —D.M.
2 Boudoir Scene
Since 1980 French antiques dealer Maurice Segoura had owned "An Interior with Two Ladies and a Gentleman" (1776) by Louis-Rolland Trinquesse. But in October 2006 at Christie’s New York sale of Old Master paintings, it was purchased by the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford for $968,000. Considered an outstanding example of French 18th-century genre painting, the scene is set in a lavish bedroom in the Louis XVI style. "It’s a wonderful document of the third quarter of the 18th century, providing detailed information of the period’s furniture, wall coverings and costumes. It also reveals how people at the time related to one another," says Linda Roth, chairman of the museum’s curatorial department and curator of European decorative arts. —D.G.
3 Modernist Miami
Although Fernand Léger (1881–1955) was long known for Cubist works that were on par with those of Picasso and Braque, it was only after World War II that he adopted a particularly distinctive style that was decidedly less abstract and made use of contrasting cylindrical and rectilinear forms. And closer to the end of his life, he was especially fascinated by the creation of sculptural figures whose forms were rendered in bold black lines emerging from white and sometimes red backgrounds. In December 2006, collector Jeffrey Loria, the owner of the Florida Marlins, donated "Femmes aux Perroquet" ("Women with Parrot"), a painted bronze sculpture, to the Miami Art Museum (MAM). "Because of Jeffrey’s remarkable generosity, visitors to MAM will be able to see exactly why Léger is considered one of the great Modernist European artists of the 20th century," says Mary Frank, president of the museum’s board of trustees. Terence Riley, the museum’s director, adds that Loria’s gift, which is valued at $2 million, is one of the "landmarks in MAM’s history." —D.M.
4 Heaven and Earth
At one time a pair of celestial and terrestrial globes were the sine qua non for the home libraries of well-educated gentlepersons. That was before the multimedia home entertainment center took over. One particularly handsome pair of library globes, circa 1815, was sold last winter by M.S. Rau Antiques of New Orleans for $250,000. The pair, made by John and William Cary of London, had previously been in the library of a townhouse in the English capital. "The Regency stands, each 46 inches tall, are made of Cuban mahogany, with compasses at the base that are purely decorative," notes Bill Rau, president of the firm. "The celestial globe has magnificent drawings of all the constellations, while the center of Africa on the terrestrial globe is marked as ‘Unknown Parts.’ Given their colossal scale, the reputation of the maker and exceptional condition, they’re the greatest pair of globes I’ve ever seen." —D.K.
5 Stone Faced
During ritual ceremonies in the ancient Mexican city of Teotihuacán, a clothed effigy would be topped with a stone mask so realistically rendered that the figure could be imagined as having come to life. The masks were carved to reflect the ideal of beauty in the culture, which flourished from 450 to 650 A.D.: full parted lips, aquiline nose, heavy-lidded eyes. But as Esther Pasztory wrote in her 1998 book Pre-Columbian Art, such masks, ultimately, "are the faces of the people of Teotihuacán … they suggest both anonymity and multiplicity." At a Sotheby’s New York sale of African, Oceanic and Pre-Columbian art in May, this stone mask sold to an anonymous American dealer for $684,000, a record for a pre-Columbian mask at auction. —D.M.
6 Sommer Time
Ohio resident William Sommer rendered the hills and dales of the Buckeye State with the same grace and acuity that post-Impressionists brought to rills and vales of the Côte d’Azur. "Landscape with Yellow Clouds" (c. 1915), from the artist’s Fauvist period, went on view for the first time in a gallery dedicated to Sommer’s work at the Akron Art Museum with the opening of its expanded and renovated facility last July. Dynamic, distinctive and joyous, "Landscape with Yellow Clouds" was painted after Sommer visited the historic Armory Show (in either New York or Chicago) in 1913, where he was delighted by Modernist works, including French Fauvist art. The value of the painting was put in the low six figures by art-market sources. "It has a wonderful freshness to it," says Barbara Tannenbaum, Akron’s director of curatorial affairs. "It is perhaps Sommer’s best painting from that early period. It will be displayed with one of his Cubist landscapes on one side and a dark expressionist piece on the other. It’s a fabulous exposition of the history of 20th-century art as seen in his work." —D.K.7 Savery Treat
The star lot at Sotheby’s January Americana sale was a circa-1765 Philadelphia Queen Anne dressing table, which brought $4.4 million. It was originally owned by the Johnson family, who were successful tanners and Quakers, and had been in their Germantown home for about 130 years. The piece, which retains its original hardware and is constructed of figured maple, is attributed to chairmaker and fellow Quaker William Savery. C.L. Prickett Antiques of Yardley, Pennsylvania, was the purchaser. "It’s a combined tour de force of American design and cabinetry," says Leslie Keno, head of Sotheby’s American furniture and decorative arts department. "The dramatic cutout scroll on the scalloped skirt gives the table a sense of movement." —D.G.
8 Animal Instincts
Although Carlo Bugatti will always be known for his fantasy furniture, he created a number of silver sculptural objects later in life. Loosely based on specific animals, he christened these extremely imaginative works "Ses Bêtes" (his creatures). At Christie’s New York in December, a rare silver claret jug (c. 1907) sold to a European dealer for $688,000. "It’s an incredible whimsical creation," says Carina Villinger, a specialist in Christie’s 20th-century decorative arts and design department. —D.G.
9 Last Respects
As a young painter, Marsden Hartley went to Germany in 1913 and returned to the United States within a year after World War I began. "It was an intense period of creativity for him," says Patricia Junker, curator of American art at the Seattle Art Museum, which acquired "Painting No. 49, Berlin" (1914–15). The painting was among nearly a thousand other gifts to the museum by some 40 collectors in celebration of SAM’s 75th anniversary last May and the opening of its new building in downtown Seattle. The value of the painting, given by Barney Ebsworth, was estimated in the low to mid-seven figures by art-market sources. Although this and other related paintings include visual references to a young German officer whose death Hartley mourned, the artist offered little explanation of its striking, richly pictorial symbolic imagery of the imperial cavalry. Junker notes "about eight works refer specifically to this same young officer" for whom Hartley "felt a great affection. Although this painting is a symbolic portrait, it is such a powerful statement that it makes me weak in the knees," says Junker. "It is just an unforgettable work of art." —D.K.
10 Loosened Ties
It’s always harder on the parents when a young man or woman leaves home. Norman Rockwell’s "Breaking Home Ties" (1954) poignantly underscores this point. The classic work, which once graced the cover of The Saturday Evening Post, brought $15,416,000, a new world auction record for Rockwell, in November 2006 when it was sold at Sotheby’s New York. In a major book published about the artist in 1975, Norman Rockwell’s America, to which the auction catalogue also referred, author Christopher Finch wrote that "the period from the mid-’40s until the late ’50s was perhaps Rockwell’s time of greatest achievement." During this period, Finch observed, Rockwell "transcended the category of illustration" and produced "richly conceived, fully rounded works … of art." —D.K.
11 Fit for a Pharaoh
When a lot comes up for sale at auction, its image is usually displayed on a screen at the front of the salesroom. Not so for the final lot of the Judith H. Siegel collection of Castellani and Giuliano revivalist jewelry at Sotheby’s New York last December. All eyes were directed toward Lisa Hubbard, chairman of Sotheby’s jewelry department for the Americas and the sale’s auctioneer, who was wearing lot 153, a circa-1860 Egyptian revivalist scarab and micromosaic necklace. Together with a matching brooch, it sold for a record of $475,200 to Gregory Kuharic, a decorative and fine arts consultant, who purchased it for a client. The necklace was composed of 15 antique steatite and faience scarabs strung on a gold chain, the brooch centered by an ancient scarab carved with the baboon god and lotus flower. Both are rare examples in the Egyptian taste created by Castellani, a 19th-century Italian jeweler. "It was the piece to own," says Kuharic, "a consummate collaboration of historic style and superb workmanship." —D.G.
12 All Done by Hand
Because Massimiliano Soldani-Benzi’s "Pietà with Two Putti Angels" is rendered in terracotta, the mark of the artist is particularly conspicuous. "Unchanged by firing, the clay Pietà preserves the swiftly dragged strokes of [Soldani-Benzi’s] modeling tools and even his fingerprints, details that in a finished bronze would have been chiseled into sharp, linear patterns and polished to glowing surfaces," says Denise Allen, associate curator of The Frick Collection in New York, which was given the sculpture as a gift by the Quentin Foundation in October 2006. Soldani-Benzi was one of the most prolific bronze sculptors in early 18th-century Florence, where he was in the employ of Cosimo II de’ Medici. Yet, this work is, according to Allen, one of the artist’s few surviving figurative groups rendered in terracotta and "the only known example of this composition." Of the several versions of this subject Soldani-Benzi executed, this is the only one in which the Virgin is not included. The two emotive putti imbue the work with a "powerfully distilled emotional intensity," says Allen. Baroque sculptures of this caliber are valued in the low seven figures. —D.M.
13 The Eyes Have It
He has the sweetness and innocence of a choirboy, and his soulful, untroubled look is made even more angelic by the black clerical-like garb he wears. Amedeo Modigliani’s "Le fils du concierge," painted while the artist was living in the south of France in 1918, brought $31,096,000 at Sotheby’s New York in November 2006. The buyer was Doris Ammann, a prominent dealer from Zurich. The price was well above the high estimate of $18 million, and within striking distance of Modigliani’s auction record of $31,368,000, achieved at Sotheby’s New York in 2004. One of Modigliani’s most significant and accomplished male portraits, "Le fils du concierge" was completed at a time when he was becoming a painter of simple, unknown people. As opposed to the blank, almond-shaped eyes typical of most of his portraits, Modigliani painted the boy’s pupils and irises so that his "gaze directly confronts the viewer," says David Norman, a Sotheby’s executive vice president and worldwide co-chairman of Impressionist and Modern Art. "Inch for inch, it is one of the most exquisite of Modigliani’s figures and one of the most tender and sensitive portraits he ever made." —D.K.
14 Inspired Illumination
At first glance it resembles a Rolodex in full flutter, or a stylized plumed helmet. In actuality, the circa-1970 Proteo table lamp is one of the most visibly exciting creations by the protean Italian architect, artist and designer Gio Ponti (see page 147 of this issue). One of these rare pieces was sold last October at the International Art + Design Fair 1900–2006 in New York for $25,000. "It looks like it’s in a state of flux, as if it were about to change its form," notes Brian Kish, the New York dealer who sold the piece. "Its name was inspired by classical mythology and yet it is indebted to Italian Futurism. It’s a utilitarian artifact verging toward sculpture. Ponti was always coming up with these sort of remarkable things." —D.K.15 Wright Turn
"Portrait of Robert Shore Milnes" (1771–72) by the 18th-century English painter known as Joseph Wright of Derby, sold last January at Sotheby’s New York for $7,208,000 to the London dealer Jean-Luc Baroni. The price was more than quadruple the high estimate of $1.5 million and set a new world auction record for the artist. "Wright’s novel approach to portraiture is evident in the unusual composition of the picture and in the unusual painting technique he employed," wrote Christopher Apostle, senior vice-president of Sotheby’s, New York Old Master paintings department, in the auction catalogue. "Milnes … is wearing the uniform of the Royal Horse Guards, his right foot resting on the trunk of a fallen tree and his arm outstretched in a commanding gesture. The overall sense is one of action and confidence, ideally suited to the portrait of the young officer." —D.K.
16 Heavy Metal
El Anatsui, a native Ghanaian artist who lives and teaches in Nigeria, finds his art materials on the street—and often in the bush. For "Fading Cloth," he took discarded metal liquor bottle tops, flattened them and stitched them together with copper wire into a quilt-like tapestry measuring more than 10 feet by 6 feet. In February the Saint Louis Art Museum purchased this 2005 "textile" from the October Gallery in London for about $80,000, as reported in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. El Anatsui’s work is both an aesthetic and political statement, for he wanted to reference the historical practice of using textiles and liquors to trade for gold and slaves. "El Anatsui is inviting the viewer to question why a material like discarded alcohol bottle tops can constitute art," says Charlotte Eyerman, the museum’s curator of modern and contemporary art. "It’s through his imagination and his extremely inventive relationship to materials that he makes that transformation." —D.M.
17 Rare Survivor
Last October the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri, received a gift of a Pawnee split-horn headdress from Nebraska, circa 1840. "Horns signify supernatural associations and endow the wearer with sacred power and protection," says Gaylord Torrence, the museum’s curator of American Indian art. Valued at more than $200,000, the headdress, one of a few Pawnee objects preserved from the historic period, is composed of a variety of materials including buffalo hide, split cow horn, eagle and raven feathers and glass beads. —D.G.
18 Abstract Expert
"I like the idea of there being a kind of perpetual motion," says Brice Marden. "If you follow a color through, you begin to understand there’s a certain kind of logic in the making." That logic is manifestly evident in Marden’s most ambitious painting to date, a 24-foot-long piece titled "The Propitious Garden of Plane Image, Third Version" (2000–06). The six-panel painting (two are shown) was acquired in November 2006 by the Museum of Modern Art while it was on view there in the first major retrospective of the artist’s work ever mounted. It was donated to MoMA as a promised gift by Donald Marron, vice chairman of the museum’s board of trustees, and his wife, Catherine. The value of the painting has been estimated in the low eight figures by art-market sources. The huge MoMA retrospective, according to New York art critic Peter Schjeldahl, confirmed Marden "as the most profound abstract painter of the past four decades." —D.K.
19 The Final Version
During his lifetime, the Quaker folk artist Edward Hicks painted about 70 versions of the "Peaceable Kingdom," parables inspired by the words of the prophet Isaiah, who predicted harmony among God’s creatures. In January, Christie’s New York sold the last of these images that the artist created. Dated 1849, the year before his death, it was painted for his daughter, Elizabeth, and handed down in the family to the seller. The work sold for $6.1 million, an auction record for the artist, and was purchased by Pennsylvania folk art dealer Harry Hartman. Until last year, it had been on loan at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri. The earliest "Kingdom" pictures were begun in 1816–18, and Hicks would continue painting them throughout his life. The early pictures are relatively uneventful and static, but during the middle years, Hicks paid more attention to detail, remodeling figures and expanding his palette. In this last work, the leopard appears relaxed, the lion nearly asleep and all 13 animals in the painting mingle peacefully as the autumn sun sets. It is a moment of surrender and acceptance. Hicks is finally at peace with the world. "It was an honor to sell Edward Hicks’ final work on the subject that dominated his painting career," says Margot Rosenberg, head of sales in Christie’s American furniture, decorative arts and folk art department. "It had impeccable provenance and is a beautiful and luminous example of this iconic image." —D.G.
20 Bronze Beauty
One of the most anticipated antiquities sales in recent years took place at Sotheby’s New York in June. The center of attention was a bronze figure of Artemis and a stag that had been deaccessioned from the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo. A fierce battle between London-based Chinese art dealer Giuseppe Eskenazi and antiquities, Islamic and Indian art dealer Oliver Forge continued for several minutes until Eskenazi emerged the winner. The final bid was a record $28.6 million, and the room exploded in thunderous applause. The unusually tall (36 1/4") figure of the goddess, represented as an adolescent girl rather than as a young woman, is shown having just released an arrow (the bow is missing). She wears elaborately laced sandals, and her chiton clings to her thighs and billows out at the sides. The sculpture is thought to be a late Hellenistic creation designed for the highly sophisticated tastes of the Roman art market in the late Republic or early Empire. According to Ugo Jandolo, the first known owner of the statue, this figure came to light sometime before the 1930s when houses near Rome’s Church of St. John Lateran were being rebuilt. "In my 37 years at Sotheby’s, this is the most beautiful sculpture ever sold," says Richard Keresey, head of Sotheby’s antiquities department. "Few works of that period have survived in such excellent condition. It is a radiant image." —D.G.
21 Vane Exercise
It stands 5 feet 2 inches, but it doesn’t have eyes of blue. It was a well-weathered verdigris from head to toe and had facial features resembling those of an Indian-head nickel. In October 2006, the rare, molded-copper Indian Chief weathervane (circa 1900) brought $5,840,000 at Sotheby’s, New York. The price was not only a world auction record for a weathervane, but for any work of American folk art at auction. The piece, from the collection of Mr. and Mrs. Walter Buhl Ford II of Grosse Pointe Farms, Michigan, was purchased by Susan and Jerry Lauren, an executive vice president at Polo-Ralph Lauren, the firm founded by his brother. Given its unusual monumentality, the Indian Chief weathervane "was probably a special order originally created for a fraternal lodge or community institution," says Nancy Druckman, director of Sotheby’s American Folk Art department. "Remarkable for its size, condition and artistry, it is a masterpiece in every respect." —D.K.22 At Sea
On an early September evening in 1893, James McNeill Whistler was rowed out into the open ocean just off the Isle of Brehat, in Brittany. There, while the boatman steadied his boat and as Whistler timed his brushstrokes to the swells of the waves, he painted on a 7-inch by 10-inch mahogany panel a work he later titled "Violet and Blue: Among the Rollers." "I painted the panel out in the full sea," Whistler wrote in a letter to his most trusted picture restorer, "and some of the spray got upon it—and the salt made it a very long time in drying … Perhaps you might gently wash it with a little beer in a soft brush—and that might take off any salt…." Long cleaned of its salt, the painting was purchased by the Detroit Institute of Arts for $1,001,000 (including a 10 percent buyer premium) at a July 2006 auction held at Cottone’s Auctions in Rochester, New York (though news of the sale was withheld until December 2006). According to Kenneth John Myers, the DIA’s curator of American art, Whistler painted about 150 small plein-air works. "It has to be in the top 10 percent of his best works of his scale," Myers says. "The work, which shows just a greenish-blue sea in the foreground and a blue sky with some purple sunset clouds and a tiny, little sailboat on the horizon line, almost reads like a Rothko. This painting points to a moment in the history of art when Whistler is marking a stage away from representationalism toward abstraction." In addition to Myers’ visceral response to the painting as "gorgeous," he is also aware of the importance the work had to Whistler: "One of the things that struck me about this painting was that it came with an incredible paper trail, in part a reflection of how much Whistler valued it." In an 1894 letter Whistler wrote to Edward Kennedy, his primary New York dealer, the painter says of his three diminutive Brittany seascapes, of which this was one, that they "are, so all the world are agreed, the finest things of the kind I have painted." —D.M.
23 Toy Land
Made of cuddly stuffed toy animals clustered into planet-like spheres, Mike Kelley’s room-sized installation, despite its cryptic title, has a certain cozy appeal. Then again, "Deodorized Central Mass with Satellites" (1991–99), also seems to be some extra-terrestrial chimera designed to play with our perceptions. The work sold for $2,704,000 last November at Phillips de Pury & Company in New York. The orb-like assemblies of plush toys are surrounded by 10 wall-mounted fiberglass "deodorizers" that intermittently emit pine-scented sprays. Says Kelley: "My wish was to come up with something resembling a mix of Darth Vader’s mask and futuristic car design." —D.K.
24 Spotlight on Suburbia
Lisa D. Freiman, curator of contemporary art at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, likens the color photographs of Gregory Crewdson to "full-scale genre films [that] incorporate the classic iconography of American suburban life." While the familiar details of suburbia do come into focus in the photographs, there is also often a "bizarre, mysterious" aura to the work, adds Freiman, who oversaw the museum’s purchase last December of Crewdson’s 1998 work "Untitled (Beer Dream)," a 47 ½-inch by 59 ½-inch print. "This untitled photography is an early one from the first year of Crewdson’s ‘Twilight’ series, produced between 1998 and 2002," says Freiman, who calls Crewdson "one of the most ambitious photographers working today." This photograph, Freiman says, "has many important characteristics associated with his work, such as a dreamlike aesthetic, an uncanny psychological use of light and dark and generic suburban houses, lawns and inhabitants." And as with many of Crewdson’s photographs, the scene depicted incorporates a concentrated burst of light, cinematic and disquieting. The museum would not disclose the final purchase price, but prints of Crewdson’s photographs routinely sell in the low five figures. —D.M.
25 Fruitful Arrangement
The most important watercolor by Paul Cézanne remaining in private hands was sold at Sotheby’s New York in May. Owned by Chinese art dealer Giuseppe Eskenazi for nearly two decades, "Nature morte au melon vert" (1902–06), brought $25.5 million. The work boasts a distinguished and varied provenance beginning with Ambroise Vollard, Cézanne’s first dealer, and has since been in the collections of Robert von Hirsch and the British Rail Pension Fund. It was at that 1989 sale that Eskenazi purchased the watercolor for a then-record $4.3 million. "As truly A-One paintings grow rarer, the market has embraced top prices for works on paper. This watercolor is the equivalent of a $60- to $80-million painting," comments David Norman, a chairman of Sotheby’s Impressionist and Modern art department. "It speaks to Cézanne’s quest to capture volume and construct pictorial space through the application of brilliant strokes of color." —D.G.
26 Lone Figure
A well-dressed woman of a certain age sits in a deserted hotel lobby looking pensively out of a window. That is the subject of Edward Hopper’s "Hotel Window" (1955), which sold at Sotheby’s New York last November for a record $26.8 million. "It is an example of the strength of the American paintings market and will make people take notice internationally that Hopper can command that price," says Peter Rathbone, co-director of Sotheby’s American paintings department. The large canvas (40" x 55") expresses the loneliness of American urban life in the mid-’50s but also, in Hopper’s own words, defined "the whole human condition." "It was a typical theme for Hopper," says Rathbone. "People are loners in their own world." —D.G.
27 Saintly Pose
Rembrandt was not interested in rendering idealized views—even of a saint. In "Saint James the Greater" (1661), he depicts the famous apostle who went from being a Galilean fisherman to one of Christ’s closest confidants with greasy, unkempt hair, dirty fingernails and the worn clothing typical of an exhausted pilgrim. As George Gordon, a senior specialist in the Sotheby’s Old Master paintings department in London wrote in a catalogue note, St. James "is unconcerned about outward appearance… [and] his arduous earthly life is stressed as a counterpart to his spirituality." Rembrandt’s portrait, theorized to be one of at least six portraits of New Testament figures he painted late in his career, sold at Sotheby’s New York in January for $25,800,000. The work, the only late religious painting by Rembrandt still in private hands, was consigned by the Shippy Foundation and sold to an anonymous buyer. Of this portrait and others by Rembrandt of New Testament figures, Gordon adds that "they are personal and humane in approach, contemplative and spiritual in character, brooding and thoughtful in mood, predominately monochromatic and dark in tone, but luminous in lighting and painted with a surprisingly broad palette." —D.M.
28 How Swede It Is
When Scott Erbes, curator of decorative arts at Louisville’s Speed Art Museum, embarked on a search for a great example of 1920s Swedish design, he kept finding two types of pieces: those in the decidedly Modernist context of the period or others that were an amalgam of more fanciful period styles, as exemplified in this cabinet by Carl Per Hendrik Malmsten. "The best Scandinavian design of the period that combines the Art Deco with the English Arts and Crafts is of exceptional quality," says Erbes, "and this cabinet from 1919 is one such example. And you don’t encounter this style much in other museums in this country." In post–World War I Sweden, Malmsten was regarded as the country’s most important designer of luxury furniture, and his creations gave rise to what the English art critic Morton Shand later referred to as "Swedish grace." Erbes secured the purchase of the cabinet in December from Jacksons 20th Century Design of Stockholm. "I can’t relate the actual purchase price," he says, "but material of this quality is undervalued in the marketplace and works like this can sell for between the mid- and upper five figures." —D.M.
29 Protective Figure
At the Sotheby’s New York sale of African, Oceanic and Pre-Columbian art in May, a Solomon Islands canoe prow ornament sold for $216,000. The distinctive carving, an anthropomorphic torso with oversized head, bent arms and inlaid blacklip oyster-shell eyes, once served as a figurehead for a large canoe used for public functions such as headhunting and ritual fishing expeditions. "Canoes had these representations of the spirit attached to the prow of the boat as protection, calling on them to bring calm waters," says Heinrich Schweizer, head of Sotheby’s department of African, Oceanic and Pre-Columbian art. Sotheby’s had previously sold the ornament in 1999 for $123,500. The carving has a distinguished provenance. It was acquired by Prague artist Adolf Hoffmeister in 1938 from Charles Ratton, a pioneer French dealer of Oceanic art. —D.G.30 Red Carpet Treatment
Among the Oriental rugs offered at Freeman’s auction house in Philadelphia in December 2006, one stood out not only for its record price but also for its provenance. A Chalaberd rug, from the southern Caucasus, dating from the early 19th century or earlier, brought a world record price of $341,625. It came from the estate of Robert Montgomery Scott, whose parents were the inspiration for Philip Barry’s play "The Philadelphia Story." The rug has an unusual single central medallion design and is related to Caucasian "sunburst" rugs of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. At least four other examples are known to exist, three of which have red grounds, similar to the one offered. David Weiss, head of Freeman’s carpet department, says, "The rug is an important example of early Caucasian weaving, with a rare, aesthetically beautiful design that includes elements relating directly to known 17th- and 18th-century carpets." —D.G.
31 Not a Very Still Life
The Abstract Expressionist painter Clyfford Still could be a difficult man. He loathed the art establishment, had few friends and fought with one of his most ardent champions. His signature paintings, with their rough-edged lightning bolts of color, reflect the man’s inner storm. None do so more than "1947-R-No. 1," which despite the date in its title was not completed until after 1952, when it was exhibited in an incomplete state at a landmark show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The painting, which had been in a private collection away from public view for 36 years, was sold in November 2006 at Christie’s New York for $21,296,000, setting a new world auction record for the artist. The figure was almost seven times larger than the previous record. Encrusted with layers of red over brown interspersed with flickering flames of black pigment and flashes of orange and white, "‘1947-R-No. 1’ seems pregnant with the idea of corporal existence springing from and returning to the earth," notes Robert Manley, a Christie’s senior vice-president and head of the firm’s prestigious evening sales of postwar and contemporary art in New York. "Any Still painting is special, but the ones completed in the 1940s and early ’50s are considered especially desirable. Altogether his output was not very large; only about 150 of his works were ever sold, with the majority of those now in museum collections. The rest remained in his estate. [The artist died in 1980]. While ‘1947-R-No. 1’, which measures 69 by 65 inches, is not among his most massive works, it has enough ‘wall power’ to hold any space without being overwhelming. It is alive and full of fire." —D.K.
32 Drip Dry
One of Jackson Pollock’s most notable large works, "No. 5, 1948" was sold in a private transaction for about $140 million, according to reports published in November 2006. Last February, another larger Pollock drip painting, "No. 28, 1950," was in the spotlight as the centerpiece of a major collection donated to The Metropolitan Museum of Art by a nonagenarian Chicago artist and collector. Paintings from the 63-piece collection, including works by Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, Helen Frankenthaler and Mark Rothko, are currently on view through February 3, 2008, in the exhibition, "Abstract Expressionism and Other Modern Works: The Muriel Kallis Steinberg Newman Collection in The Metropolitan Museum of Art." Measuring more than 5½ feet by 8½ feet, "No. 28, 1950" would easily be valued in the mid- to high eight figures, according to art-market sources. Although darker and more somber than the densely colorful "No. 5, 1948," this Pollock has its own swirling energy and subtle flickers of pastel color. Writing in the museum’s "Bulletin," Nan Rosenthal, a special consultant to the Metropolitan and a co-curator of the present show, called "this stunning work" one of Pollock’s "classic mural-sized drip pictures, executed on the floor of his Long Island studio … using gravity and motion to form" the dramatic linear skeins. —D.K.
33 Fowl Play
It made quite a splash. A merganser hen duck decoy sold at auction in January for $856,000, which is a world auction record for a waterfowl decoy. The sale was conducted jointly by Christie’s New York and Guyette & Schmidt Inc., an auctioneer and dealer in duck decoys based in St. Michaels, Maryland. The hen was made by renowned carver Lothrop Holmes, a cemetery caretaker who produced a limited number of decoys in the last half of the 19th century. "Most of these were for his own use," says Gary Guyette, president of Guyette & Schmidt. "Very few have survived. I know of only three other of his mergansers. This one had been in the collection of Adele Earnest, a pioneer collector of American folk art, who back in the 1930s wrote The Art of the Decoy. In 1976 Earnest sold it to George and Hope Wick, well-known collectors in San Diego. The seller was one of their descendants." —D.K.
34 Fire Sale
When a fireman was called to duty in 19th-century Edo (present-day Tokyo), he and his colleagues would rush to the site of a fire and, instead of applying water, would tear down the adjoining houses so as to isolate the blaze. While performing his heroic duty in a city dense with wooden structures, the fireman would be dramatically garbed in a quilted cotton jacket sometimes painted with a scene—in this case, one that appears to depict a fire and the saving of lives. This fireman’s coat (not shown) from the early Meiji period (1868–1912), was acquired in September 2006 by the Art Institute of Chicago for an undisclosed sum; Glenn Roberts, a notable New York–based collector of antique Asian dress, says that a garment of this caliber could be worth about $15,000. "The striking imagery on the back of the coat is unparalleled in its style and subject matter," says Christa Thurman, the museum’s curator of textiles. —D.M.
35 Film Feline
"The Black Cat" has everything a horror film from Hollywood’s golden age should have: two masters of the macabre, Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi; a dark, twisted tale based on the eponymous Edgar Allan Poe short story; and a delicate damsel in distress. A poster for the 1934 movie realized $286,000 (est. $100,000–$175,000) at an auction conducted last March by Heritage Auction Galleries in Dallas. Not only was "The Black Cat" Universal’s biggest box office hit in 1934, but the first of eight films starring the devilish duo, Karloff and Lugosi. "Horror material is as hot as it ever has been," says Grey Smith, director of vintage movie poster auctions for Heritage. "‘The Black Cat’ poster in itself was exceedingly rare. But posters of Universal horror films from the 1920s and ’30s are the cream of the crop for collectors. The studio invented the genre." —D.K.
36 Masked Man
While traveling through British Columbia in 1863, a Scottish minister, Robert Dundas, began to collect Northwest Coast Indian objects. In October 2006 his great-grandson, Simon Carey, consigned the collection to Sotheby’s New York. All 57 lots sold for a total of $7 million, setting a record for a sale of American Indian art. The top lot, a Tsimshian polychromed wood face mask of a shaman, sold for $1.8 million. The buyer was Donald Ellis, a dealer based in Dundas, Ontario, who was bidding for David Thomson, son of the late Canadian publishing magnate Kenneth Thomson. David Roche, an expert in Sotheby’s Native American art department, calls the mask "the finest piece of American Indian art ever sold at auction. It has a superhuman quality, capturing the moment of transition from this world to the next." —D.G.
37 Mr. Guitar Man
In the early 1960s, a Chicago man took his teenage son shopping for an electric guitar. Attracted by its sharp, exuberant angles and futuristic profile reminiscent of Sputnik, the teenager immediately chose the affordable Gibson Explorer, which is noted for its mahogany neck, curved peghead with a pearl inlay and rosewood fingerboard. Although that teenager did not grow up to become the next Buddy Holly or Eric Clapton, he did keep the guitar for many years in the closet of his Florida home. In 1992 Hurricane Andrew destroyed his residence and its contents, but the Gibson Explorer was miraculously spared. When David Bonsey, the director of fine musical instruments at Skinner Inc., heard about the existence of this guitar, he flew to Dallas (where the owner had relocated) to see it. At a Skinner sale in October 2006, the guitar sold to an anonymous collector for $611,000, "a record for a non-celebrity-owned American-made musical instrument," says Bonsey. "Less than 100 of these models were made, and of those even fewer went out of the factory because the design was so wacky," says Bonsey. "This is absolutely the best example, in mint condition, of a guitar of this genre." —D.M.38 Interior View
When the famous French silhouettist Auguste Edouart visited Boston in 1841, he had his wife posed with Samuel Appleton and two other visitors in the Appleton home on Beacon Hill. "The resulting silhouette he rendered is so important because so few scenes of Boston interiors of the period exist," says Richard Nylander, senior curator of Boston-based Historic New England, which purchased the work from a private dealer in April. "What we’re seeing is a Boston interior of the 1820s, since the family had been living there since then," adds Nylander, who would not reveal the purchase price, though he did cite the sale of an Edouart silhouette at a Sotheby’s New York auction in 2006 for $90,000. Appleton’s connections with Historic New England are through his brother Nathan, whose grandson, William Sumner Appleton, founded the organization in 1910. —D.M.
39 National Treasure
Since 1847, visitors to the U.S. Capitol have been able to look up into the Rotunda and see John Vanderlyn’s depiction of Christopher Columbus landing in the Americas, one of many iconic scenes painted there. In April, the Birmingham Museum of Art in Alabama acquired Vanderlyn’s circa-1840 "Study for Landing of Columbus," a chalk-and-pencil-on-paper drawing for the later painting, which has twice been reproduced on American postage stamps—one issued in 1869 and the other in 1893 to mark the 400th anniversary of Columbus’ arrival. "The opportunity to own an important original work by John Vanderlyn is exceedingly rare," says Graham Boettcher, curator of American art at the museum, who oversaw the purchase from the Childs Gallery in Boston. "Since the mid-1980s, fewer than 25 original works by Vanderlyn have come up at auction." Some of them have sold, according to auction records, for prices ranging from the low to mid-five figures. —D.M.
40 Bill of Receipt
Good contractors always write up detailed bills of receipt, indicating materials used, costs incurred, procedures followed. When Michelangelo Buonarroti assumed the role of contractor, he was particularly conscientious, especially for the repair of one of his own most important sculptures, "Risen Christ," the masterpiece he completed in 1520 for Rome’s Santa Maria sopra Minerva. Even the best sculptures sometimes need repair, as was recorded by the artist in a document that he wrote and signed on October 26, 1521, and that sold to an anonymous buyer at a December 2006 Sotheby’s, New York auction for $576,000 (the sale included two additional documents, written in Latin, from two of his patrons, popes Clement VII and Julius III). Michelangelo employed two fellow sculptors to finish decorative details on the work and build a tabernacle for it, as well as to make repairs to some of the "folds" in the marble. In the letter, Michelangelo names his banker, agent and fees paid to the workers: 4 gold ducats to one and 3 to the other. —D.M.
41 Love Story
In the beginning, there was the drawing of "Adam and Eve" by Albrecht Dürer that the Morgan Library has long considered to be among its most important and valuable works on paper. Then, as of September 2006, there was the Dürer print of the primordial couple that the library purchased from the dealer Robert M. Light for an undisclosed sum, likely in the high six figures, at least. This new acquisition is what is known as an early impression of the second state of the print—a printing that was made after the artist had reworked the original plate in 1504. Upon announcing the purchase, the Morgan’s director, Charles E. Pierce Jr., commented, "We had to buy this print of ‘Adam and Eve’ because we had the original drawing and because it was unlikely that such a pristine impression would appear on the art market again anytime soon. Together, they make an extraordinary statement about Dürer’s creative genius." —D.M.
42 Wildlife Observed
Rembrandt Bugatti was a member of an illustrious family: His father Carlo was an Art Nouveau furniture designer, and his brother Ettore was renowned for designing race cars. Rembrandt became a master of animal sculpture, studying his subjects in the Paris and Antwerp zoos, often actually working in the animals’ cages (not the dangerous ones). In December 2006 Sotheby’s New York sold "Babouin Sacre Hamadryas" (c. 1909–10), one of Bugatti’s most important works for $2.2 million. "The baboon is one of Bugatti’s great iconic masterworks, brilliantly displaying the artist’s unique talent of capturing the psychological depth and power of his animalier subjects," says Jodi Pollack, a specialist in Sotheby’s 20th-century design department. The work, which had been consigned by the Genesee Country Village & Museum in Mumford, New York, was purchased by New York dealer French & Company. It is numbered six of only 11 bronze casts known to exist of this model. Others in this series are in the collections of the Fine Arts Museums in San Francisco and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. —D.G.
43 Brief Encounter
Auction prices for paintings by the 19th-century French artist William-Adolphe Bouguereau have ranged upward of $1 million recently, so it was welcome news when hedge fund manager Steven Cohen and his wife, Alexandra, donated the artist’s "Faun and Bacchante" (1860) to the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Connecticut, last December. The academically trained painter, who exhibited the work at the Paris Salon in 1861, is best-known for his paintings of mythological and biblical subjects and sentimental genre scenes. The two figures in classical poses are meticulously detailed, in contrast to the landscape and foreground, which are rendered more freely. Peter Sutton, the museum’s executive director, says, "We are pleased to receive this picture at a time when Bouguereau’s reputation has benefited from a dramatic revival and there is more appreciation of 19th-century art." The work has an unusual provenance. It was purchased in 1958 by William and Frances Haussner, who displayed it in their Baltimore restaurant for many years. —D.G.
44 Color Identity
Their goal, according to one news report, was to "find works of singular quality that moves them." Kenneth C. Griffin, managing director and CEO of the Citadel Investment Group, and his wife, Anne, must have been very moved the day that Paul Gray, a director of the Richard Gray Gallery, which has branches in both Chicago and New York, took the Windy City couple to Los Angeles to see the Jasper Johns painting "False Start" (1959). The Griffins were struck by the exuberant canvas, considered one of the artist’s seminal works, and bought it from deaccessioning collector David Geffen for $80 million, which well may be the highest price for a painting by a living artist. The painting also had an extraordinary provenance, having belonged over the years to noted collectors, such as New York taxi-fleet owner Robert Scull and his wife, Ethel; architect François de Menil, heir to an oil-drilling fortune; and media billionaire Samuel I. Newhouse Jr. The painting, with its pyrotechnical bursts of bright blue, red, orange and yellow, is stenciled with the names of the colors on a background of spirited brushwork. Often the colors are falsely identified, with the word "white," for example, superimposed in red paint on a splash of yellow. In style it has elements of both Abstract Expressionism and Pop. —D.K.
45 Acting Beastly
Men are animals—or at least that was the thinking in medieval Europe when the art of making bestiaries (illuminated manuscripts using the characteristics of animals to comment on human behavior) was at its height. Among the supreme examples of such texts is the Northumberland Bestiary, a 13th-century volume that the J. Paul Getty Museum purchased in June from a private dealer for an undisclosed sum. An article in The New York Times quoted experts saying that the price might have been as high as $20 million. "As one of the finest manuscripts of any kind to have been in private hands, the Northumberland Bestiary is a truly rare and special acquisition," remarks Getty manuscripts curator Thomas Kren. "The vigor and spontaneity of the drawings are a hallmark of the period style." Illuminated bestiaries are recognized as some of the most important products of English medieval art, and the Northumberland Bestiary is one of the three prime examples still in existence; the others reside in the Morgan Library and the British Library. —D.M.46 Going Grien
Franz Koenigs was a highly respected collector of Old Master drawings in Germany and Holland. At Christie’s New York January sale of Old Master Works and 19th-Century Drawings, six drawings from his collection were the day’s highlights. Topping the list was "Head of a Man" by Hans Baldung Grien, a powerful and deeply expressive drawing, which brought $3.7 million, a world auction record for the artist. The three-quarter view, rendered in black chalk on light brown paper, dates from between the early 1510s and mid-1530s. It is one of a small group of head studies by the artist and among his largest works to have survived. Fewer than five known drawings are believed to remain in private hands. Born into a family of academics and intellectuals, Baldung began his studies in Strasbourg, then moved in 1503 to Nuremberg, where he acquired the nickname "Grien," most likely because of his preference for the color. Among the most powerful influences on Grien was Albrecht Dürer, but while Dürer leans to formal perfection, Grien tends to informality and unpredictability. "He’s an incredibly rare artist; a Grien drawing appears once in a generation," says Christie’s Old Master drawings specialist Jennifer Wright. —D.G.
47 Class Glass
Dragonflies were one of Louis Comfort Tiffany’s favorite forms and have become a signature motif of his lamps. In December 2006 the Art Institute of Chicago acquired a circa-1906 Tiffany Studios hanging-head dragonfly lamp on a mosaic and turtleback-tile base. A similar lamp sold at a Christie’s New York 2004 auction for just under $1 million. "The brilliant hues of the glass complement the turtleback insets and mosaics on the bronze base," says Ellen Roberts, the museum’s assistant curator of the American art department. —D.G.
48 Urban Life
At Christie’s Impressionist and modern art sale in New York in November 2006, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s "Berlin Street Scene" (1913) was purchased by New York’s Neue Galerie for $38 million. The work depicts an urban crowd painted primarily in blues with a prostitute in a bright-red dress on the left. It came to Christie’s only three months after the German government returned it to the heirs of Alfred and Thekla Hess. It had been hanging since 1990 in Berlin’s Brucke Museum, which acquired it from the German government. "It was a thrillingly rare example of Kirchner’s street scenes and is arguably the finest one still on the market. The painting’s visual impact lies in its exciting evocation of Berlin street life on the eve of World War I," says Conor Jordan, senior specialist in Christie’s Impressionist and Modern art department. —D.G.
49 In Stitches
Were it proper to look beneath the black coats and capes worn by Amish men and women, viewers would likely discover colored shirts and dresses, all handmade. This "Diamond in the Square" wool quilt, made by Amish women in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in the 1930s, is meant to reflect the hues found on their inside clothing—teal blue, lavender and vermillion, among other shades. This example is one of 11 quilts given in November 2006 to the Shelburne Museum in Vermont by Barbara and Michael Polemis, noted New York–based collectors. "In their quilts, Amish women conform to a conventional format," explains Jean Burks, senior curator at the Shelburne. "A central design sits within a narrow inner border, while a wide outer border is finished with an added binding, usually of a contrasting color. Elaborate, sweeping feather, wreath and floral-spray quilting designs balance the stark geometry of the piecing of Lancaster quilts." Individual values vary greatly, but recent auction records of Amish quilts of the period reveal that similar examples have sold for about $20,000. —D.M.
50 Czarist Splendor
When legendary Paris dealer Maurice Segoura decided to retire, his collection, including a number of private pieces, was sold at Christie’s New York in October 2006. Anticipating strong public interest, the auction house had interior designer Juan Pablo Molyneux recreate Segoura’s sumptuous gallery for the presale exhibition. Among the top lots in this setting was a pair of Russian gilt-bronze console tables that sold for $1.36 million, a record for Russian furniture. The circa-1800 tables have green serpentine marble tops above a paneled frieze inset with jasper panels centered by a female mask within a scrolled cartouche. "They were superb examples of the Russian stonecutter’s art combined with beautiful gilt-bronze mounts," says William Strafford, Christie’s head of European furniture and decorative arts. "Although they date from the beginning of the 19th century, their clean lines have a wonderfully contemporary feel." —D.G.
51 Waist-Bound
In 19th-century Europe, members of the aristocracy and the wealthy bourgeoisie would often adorn their vests with a chatelaine, a decorative belt hook or clasp from which hung a series of chains. As described by Jutta-Annette Page, curator of glass at the Toledo Museum of Art, which acquired this circa-1845 French example from H. Blairman & Sons Ltd. of London last March, "Each chain is mounted with a useful household appendage, in this case a vinaigrette, a key and a seal. This appears to be the grandest and most complete chatelaine by Froment-Meurice that is still in existence today." By 1844, the jewelry firm of Froment-Meurice had become known as the best in Paris. This version features rounded arches and sculptural elements reminiscent of Italian and French Renaissance architecture; some of the figures depicted include Dante and his ever-elusive love Beatrice and the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and busts of his children—at least the legitimate ones. The last available value for the chatelaine is $19,359, achieved when it sold at a Christie’s auction in Amsterdam in 2002, but Page stresses that the work is worth considerably more today. —D.M.
52 Maharaja Magnificence
In India the pearl was a treasured gem that was not only worn but woven into and embedded in the pillars and doorways of royal residences. Among the most passionate jewelry collectors were the Maharajas of Baroda, in particular the Maharaja Khande Rao (ruled 1856–1870), who came into possession of a seven-strand pearl necklace, which was broken up in 1948. At Christie’s New York jewelry sale in April, expectations were high for the final lot, the remaining two strands of the original Baroda necklace. Composed of 68 pearls perfectly matched in color and graduated in size (some as large as marbles) it sold to an Asian collector for $7 million. (The previous record was set at Christie’s Geneva in 2004 when a double strand of 88 graduated pearls brought $3.1 million.) "The color of the pearls was perfect, slightly creamy with pink overtones. Their skin was flawless, absolutely blemish-free," comments Rahul Kadakia, head of Christie’s jewelry department for the Americas. "I can say without hesitation these were the finest pearls offered for sale ever." —D.G.
53 Winged Sphinx
Last March as Alan Darr, curator of European sculpture and decorative arts at the Detroit Institute of Arts, led patrons and high-level museum personnel through the crowded Maastricht art fair (TEFAF), he discovered what he calls a "masterpiece of French Directoire and pre-Empire furniture." For years, Darr had been looking for an important example of such furniture, typical of the late 18th century, and what he and his colleagues found at the booth of the Zurich dealer Richard Redding is, says Darr, "one of the great pieces of European furniture to come up in the market in many years." One of the specialists on the trip with Darr made the pronouncement that no other American institution had anything like this mahogany pier table with a sphinx monopod, designed by a virtual consortium of period master artisans. The masterful demi-lune Parisian pier table, or console, is characterized by reddish-brown mahogany veneers, gilt bronzes, Wedgwood medallions, a blue marble top and a winged sphinx. As Darr explains, the Greek version of the Egyptian sphinx features wings. He would not disclose the purchase price except to say, "It is worth well above $500,000." —D.M.54 Adele, Too
Gustav Klimt painted Adele Bloch-Bauer three times. First, he cast her as the subject of the biblically inspired "Judith" (1901), then six years later he completed the elaborately gilded, mosaic-caparisoned "Adele Bloch-Bauer I." The latter made headlines in June 2006 when it was sold in a private transaction for $135 million to cosmetics-company executive Ronald Lauder. In November 2006, a third painting, "Adele Bloch-Bauer II" (1912) brought $87.9 million in a sale to an anonymous buyer at Christie’s New York. That figure, however, set a world auction record for the artist and, in some quarters, it was murmured that this painting was the more felicitous of the two Adeles in its multi-hued presentation of Bloch-Bauer as a self-assured woman of means. Like Adele I, the second portrait was one of several paintings that had been confiscated by the Nazis and were restituted to the subject’s heirs after a long international legal struggle. The work is the largest of the three Klimt paintings for which Bloch-Bauer posed. "This full-length standing portrait of Adele is also the painting that marks the beginning of a completely new phase in Klimt’s art," says Guy Bennett, Christie’s head of Impressionist and Modern art in New York, during which the artist "embraced color, painterly texture and abstract pattern with renewed vigor." —D.K.
55 Light Welcome
You don’t have to enter the new three-story building to enjoy one of the new site-specific commissions unveiled last January at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. A 30-foot-tall sign by Jenny Holzer, valued in the low to mid-six figures, rises over the entrance of the structure, one of three comprising the museum’s expanded campus. "Holzer’s textual light-emitting-diode installation, titled "For San Diego," houses thousands of LEDs in clear plastic tubes. "The light has a floating quality," notes Stephanie Hanor, MCASD’s senior curator. —D.K.
56 Papal Prize
In his day, Giorgio Vasari was the one critic from whom an artist sought praise. Of Giulio Clovio (1498–1578), Vasari wrote in his Lives of the Most Excellent Italian Architects, Painters and Sculptors: "For many centuries, and perhaps for yet other centuries, there has been no more excellent illuminator or painter of small things than Giulio Clovio, who has far surpassed all others in this exercise." Vasari might well have been referring to Clovio’s "The Lamentation" (c. 1550), a gouache heightened with gold on vellum that he likely made for Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, who presented it to Pope Paul IV. In September, the National Gallery of Art acquired the work from Salamander Gallery for an undisclosed sum (though previous auction records reveal that works by Clovio easily command sums in the low seven figures). Andrew Robison, senior curator of prints and drawings at the National Gallery of Art, urging the museum to acquire the work, wrote, "With its intense spirituality and meditative pathos, its elegant figures in rich colors with subtle gold highlights, its exceedingly refined and delicate techniques, this is one of the most exquisite and perfect drawings of the High Renaissance in Papal Rome." —D.M.
57 Fairest of All
The image one sees in the mirror is fairest of all. It certainly holds true in this instance, no matter who gazes into it. Measuring 35 inches high, the Neoclassical carved and gilded frame holds a mirror engraved with a seascape of a ship in full sail against a cloud-studded sky. Made in the Netherlands, the circa-1780 mirror was sold last January, when it was included in "Reflections of Splendor," an exhibition of rare European mirrors at L’Antiquaire & The Connoisseur Inc., in New York. The price listed was $40,000. "The curator of ceramics and glass at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam told us that engraving of this quality was usually done on much smaller pieces, often on boxes," says Helen Costantino Fioratti, the firm’s president. "It’s a unique piece that probably couldn’t be replaced now at double the price." —D.K.
58 A Holy Pose
Here is an example of form following function, for the gently twisting figure of Christ rendered in flawless ivory is the result of the natural curvature of the tusk from which it was fashioned by François Duquesnoy in the 1620s. Soon after the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., acquired this work in May from London dealer Daniel Katz, the museum’s director, Earl A. Powell III, commented, "From a technical perspective, this carving is breathtaking. The artist has truly breathed life into this piece of ivory, providing a tremendously sympathetic portrayal of Jesus before the Crucifixion." The museum considers the sculpture to be one of the best examples of European ivory carvings of the Roman Baroque. The Flemish-born Duquesnoy (1597–1643) settled in Italy, where he earned a reputation as one of the most accomplished practitioners of ivory carving. Ironically, none of these ivories have been identified definitively, thus the National Gallery’s careful qualification that the sculpture is "attributed" to the artist, though Nicholas Penny, senior curator of sculpture and decorative arts, and other museum authorities insist that this is a "Duquesnoy invention and is consistent with his work." While the purchase price is unknown, another Baroque sculpture acquired by the National Gallery last year (Giovanni Francesco Susini’s "The Young Saint John the Baptist," featured as a 2006 Top Treasure) was valued in excess of $3 million. —D.M.
59 Moon Glow
The 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing was one of the most joyous occasions in American history. A superb commemoration of this great event in the form of a group of Apollo 11 documents and memorabilia was sold to a private collector by The 19th Century Shop of Stevenson, Maryland, at Palm Beach! America’s International Fine Art & Antique Fair last February for $900,000. Stephan Loewentheil, owner of the shop, who personally assembled the collection, which included an official NASA photograph signed by the three crew members, notes, "I don’t think material of this quality could ever be put together again. The event was one of mankind’s greatest moments." —D.K.
60 A Sterling Acquisition
Crumpets, biscuits, petits fours, sweetmeats, virtually anything put into this silver basket by Paul Storr would have looked tempting. The work (c. 1813–14), which bears the arms of George Wyndham, third Earl of Egremont—the patron of J.M.W. Turner and John Constable among others—was given to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in November 2006 by Rita Gans. The gift now takes its place among the 103-piece Jerome and Rita Gans Collection of English Silver, of which 36 pieces are by Storr—and any single piece of which is worth in the five figures. "There is no better example of the muscular classicism of Paul Storr’s silver than the basket," says Ellenor Alcorn, VMFA’s consulting curator for the Gans Collection. —D.M.
61 All Wrapped Up
On a trip to Egypt in 1900, Liberty Holden, publisher of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, learned that a dealer had discovered a group of four mummies. He purchased the sarcophagus and mummy of the priest Neskhons, had it cleared for export by the Egyptian Museum in Cairo and shipped to Cleveland, where it was donated to the Western Reserve Historical Society. Last December Christie’s New York sold the painted-wood sarcophagus and mummy, which date from the XXI Dynasty (c. 990–940 B.C.), to an American collector for $1.1 million. "The painting was extraordinary, and the mummy, wrapped in linen, was still intact," says Max Bernheimer, international head of Christie’s antiquities department. "It’s as good as any ancient Egyptian sarcophagus and mummy gets." —D.G.
62 Down on the Farm
George Henry Durrie was one of the best-known of the artists who created the views published by Currier & Ives. In 1858 he painted the bucolic country scene "Ketcham Farm in Winter, New Haven," which sold at Doyle New York last November for $772,000. The painting was a gift to the Ketchams, a New Haven, Connecticut family who were personal friends of the artist, and from them it descended to the present consignor. "The painting is an absolute classic image by Durrie," says Elaine Banks Stainton, executive director of Doyle’s paintings and drawings department. —D.G.63 Light Effects
Four kinds of light—the glow of a campfire, the beam from a lighthouse, the radiance of the moon and its soft reflection playing on the water’s surface—are depicted in Joseph Vernet’s haunting "A Harbor in Moonlight," a work that was given in September 2006 to the Saint Louis Art Museum as a gift from museum trustee Christian B. Peper. The painting is rumored to be worth an amount in the mid-six figures. Although Judith Mann, the museum’s curator of European art to 1800, explains that the scene evokes Naples, she also points out that "Vernet sought to blend poetic reverie with details suggestive of a particular place. Often, the artist used elements evocative of the Neapolitan coastline without the specificity of a particular view." In 1734, the French-born Vernet began a 20-year stay in Italy where, as Mann, says, he supplied "the gentlemen of the Grand Tour with picturesque representations of some of Italy’s most popular sites." —D.M.
64 Salem’s Lot
A 13-inch silver flagon (c. 1769), made a round trip from Salem, Massachusetts, in January. The exquisitely crafted piece was sold by the First Church of Salem at Christie’s New York for $102,000. The purchaser: the Peabody-Essex Museum of Salem. The sinuous baluster-shape flagon was made by John Andrew, considered Salem’s most important 18th-century silversmith. Discussing its relevance, Patricia E. Kane, curator of American decorative arts at the Yale University Art Gallery and author of a book on Colonial Massachusetts silver, called the flagon "the finest extant example of Salem silver known to date." —D.K.
65 Precious Seating
At Sotheby’s New York sale of Russian works of art last April, a tiny Fabergé gold-and-enamel bonbonnière sold for $2.28 million. Considering its diminutive size (2 l/4" high), that translates to approximately $1 million per inch. Created by Michael Perchin, one of the House of Fabergé’s leading workmasters, in St. Petersburg between 1899 and 1903, it is shaped like a miniature French Empire–style armchair, its back formed by a series of golden lyres. "It is the rarest of Fabergé’s creations," says Gerard Hill, head of Sotheby’s Russian works of art department. —D.G.
66 Florentine Figure
It’s a commanding visage. The face on the 60-inch glazed terracotta statue of San Giovanni da Capestrano (c. 1550) exudes intensity and intelligence. The acquisition of the sculpture by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art was finalized in January. It was purchased from Salander-O’Reilly Galleries in New York for about $1.2 million, according to art-market sources. Attributed to Florentine sculptor Santi Buglioni, the piece has "a compelling expressiveness," says Mary Levkoff, LACMA’s curator of European sculpture and classical antiquities. —D.K.
67 Rare Representation
A watercolor painting depicts a girl of about 10 years old as she stands in a field, a wooden tub balanced on top of her head. Penciled on her white apron is the name "Topsy." What makes the portrait of the girl so remarkable is that it is one of the very few known representations of an enslaved African-American girl, especially one from which caricature and stereotyping are absent. The little girl was painted in 1830 by Mary Anna Randolph Custis, the future wife of General Robert E. Lee and the daughter of George Washington’s step-grandson. Topsy, whose name may have been added later in reference to the character of the same name who appears in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, is likely one of the slaves who served at Arlington House, the Custis and Lee family plantation. It had once belonged to the Confederate general J.E.B. Stuart. The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation purchased the work in April from Alexander Gallery in New York; it was part of a large cache of ephemera that had been secured by the gallery and was reputedly for sale together for "about $400,000," says Jim Bradley, a spokesperson for Colonial Williamsburg. He would not comment on the value of the painting alone, but it was the most valuable item in the archive, easily worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. —D.M.
68 Divine Image
A 64-inch-high granite sculpture of Shiva as Brahma offered at Sotheby’s New York sale of Indian and Southeast Asian art in March sold for $4 million. Formerly in the collection of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, it was purchased by London Asian art dealer John Eskenazi on behalf of the Cleveland Museum of Art. The sculpture dates from the Chola period in the 10th century, the "golden age" of South Indian history. Sotheby’s specialist Theresa McCullough calls the work "intricately and beautifully carved and very sensuous, which is one of the features of Indian sculpture. The stone is highly polished and adds to the feeling of flesh." —D.G.
69 Striking Earpiece
For a day in the market, a wealthy woman in ancient Greece (c. 220–130 B.C.) might have donned these gold pendant earrings molded into the shape of an eagle grasping thunderbolts. According to Sandra Knudsen, associate curator of ancient art at the Toledo Museum of Art, which purchased the remaining earring in March from Antiquarium Ltd. in New York, the eagles represent Zeus, king of the gods. Similar pieces of Hellenistic-era jewelry have sold at recent auctions in mid-five figures. —D.M.
70 Luminous Landscape
It has been a long journey for J.M.W. Turner’s painting "Glaucus and Scylla" (1841). Since 1966 it had been in the collection of the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, but in 2006 was returned to the heirs of John and Anna Jaffé. John Jaffé, a British subject, had purchased it from a Paris dealer in 1902, and after his death, the painting was left to his wife, who bequeathed it to her nephews and niece. But she was trapped in France in 1942, and the contents of her home confiscated by the Vichy authorities. The painting reappeared on the market in 1956, when Emile Leitz of Paris sold it to Agnew’s of London. A year later, the painting was sold to Howard Young Galleries of New York and was privately owned until 1966, when Newhouse Galleries in New York sold it to the Kimbell Art Foundation. Following its restitution, the heirs consigned the painting to Christie’s, which offered it in its Important Old Masters sale in New York in April. There, it was repurchased by the Kimbell for $6.4 million. The work, which is the most important British 19th-century painting in the museum’s collection, shows a mythological scene of unrequited love set in a dazzling golden landscape. "In the context of a European art collection in the U.S., the late works by Turner have special resonance because they were much admired by the Abstract Expressionists, who saw Turner losing interest in detail and moving toward more abstract effects," says Malcolm Warner, the museum’s deputy director. —D.G.71 Plain Geometry
A major collection of Brazilian Constructive Art—hip, cool and engagingly modern—was acquired by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. The announcement that the museum had purchased the 98-piece Adolpho Leirner Collection was made in March. The total value of the collection was estimated by art-market sources in the mid-seven figures. The collection, which consists of the finest examples of geometric abstraction in paintings, constructions and other media by outstanding Brazilian artists in the period following World War II, "represents a key chapter in the global story of Modernism," says Dr. Peter C. Marzio, the director of the MFA, Houston. The contributions of these artists has only recently been recognized outside of Brazil. Pictured above is "Visible Idea" (c. 1956), which was created out of wood plastered with paint, by Waldemar Cordeiro. —D.K.
72 Annunciation Announcement
We all have our favorite stories. One of El Greco’s was "The Annunciation," which he painted repeatedly. This version, which was deaccessioned from the Toledo Museum of Art and sold at a Sotheby’s New York auction last January for $4,184,000, is described by Sotheby’s specialists as "beautiful," "of superior quality," and for years "regarded as the prime example of the composition." —D.M.
73 Wood Work
For collectors of furniture by the American craftsman George Nakashima, Sotheby’s New York sale of the famed Arthur and Evelyn Krosnick collection last December was the place to be. Nakashima collectors since the 1960s, the Krosnicks, together with Nelson Rockefeller, were the artist’s most devoted clients. But in 1989 their Princeton, New Jersey, home, along with more than 100 examples of Nakashima furniture, burned to the ground. Fortunately the collection’s centerpiece, a 91-inch redwood dining table called the "Arlyn" (a combination of the couple’s first names), had been on loan to the American Craft Museum (now the Museum of Arts & Design in New York) at the time and escaped destruction. As expected, it was the sale’s top lot, selling for a record $822,400. The purchaser was the Two Red Roses Foundation, a Florida-based institution dedicated to the acquisition and exhibition of works from the American Arts and Crafts Movement. "The legendary Arlyn table is Nakashima’s masterwork and one of the top 10 most important lots of 20th-century furniture to appear on the market," says Robert Aibel, owner of the Moderne Gallery in Philadelphia, which specializes in Nakashima. —D.G.
74 Vintage Vessel
Applause broke out following vigorous bidding for a rare archaic bronze wine vessel and cover (fangjia) at Sotheby’s New York sale of Chinese ceramics and works of art in March. Formerly in the collection of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, this late Shang dynasty (13th–11th century B.C.) vessel sold for $8.1 million to English dealer Roger Keverne, who was acting on behalf of Compton Verney, a museum outside Stratford-upon-Avon, England. All four sides are cast in low relief, a loop handle extends from one side, the other three sides are adorned with riveting owl heads. These vessels were used for ancestor worship or sacrificial ceremonies and intended to hold black millet wine that was poured onto the ground. "The market always places great esteem and high value on certain peaks throughout the 5,000-year span of art. Archaic bronzes are one of those peaks, and the sale affirms its validity and importance," explains Joe-Hynn Yang, head of the Chinese art department at Sotheby’s. —D.G.
75 Attention, Shoppers
Andy Warhol was quoted once as saying, "All department stores will become museums and all museums will become department stores." In Andreas Gursky’s "99 Cent II Diptych," which sold to a private collector at a November 2006 auction at Phillips, de Pury & Company, New York, for $2.48 million, Warhol’s maxim appears to have come true. As stated in the Phillips catalogue about the sale, the 2001 photograph "celebrates the seductive powers of supermarket packaging and most, importantly, presentation … At the core of Gursky’s practice is an interest in commerce, whether the production, trade or sale of goods, and this is best exemplified in ‘99 Cent II Diptych.’" The massively scaled work (81" x 134 ¼"), which depicts a dizzying array of wares displaying in the aisles of a discount store, embodies Gursky’s typical methods— making color prints from celluloid negatives, which, according to the Phillips catalogue, "contribute to the crystalline quality definition and high-gloss sheen for which his photographs are famed." —D.M.
76 Emotive Marble
Even though Jean-Antoine Houdon’s portrait of "Madame His" (1774–75) is rendered in marble, his depth of carving can fool the viewer into thinking her eyes are pale-colored and misting with emotion. "I know this portrait well," says Anne L. Poulet, director of The Frick Collection, to which the sculpture was given as a gift in October by collector Eugene V. Thaw, "and it is a work of exquisite beauty and refinement, as well as a rare surviving example that preserves Houdon’s original luminous surface treatment." Other Houdon portraits featured as past Top Treasures have been valued at several million dollars. —D.M.
77 Dower Power
If a young person came into a marriage today with nothing but the Black Unicorn Chest, it would represent, even empty, a substantial dowry. The chest, painted and decorated with red, black, ivory and yellow designs on a blue-green ground, was sold by Skinner, Boston, in November 2006 for $446,000. The buyer was Olde Hope Antiques Inc. of New Hope, Pennsylvania. "The chest had been in the same Massachusetts family since the early 20th century," says Ed Hild, co-owner of Olde Hope Antiques. "There’s a nearly identical one at the Philadelphia Museum of Art." —D.K.
78 Polar Expression
A 15-foot totem pole was installed last spring at the Field Museum, Chicago. The piece, valued in the low to mid-six figures by American Indian art experts, was commissioned by the museum to replace a totem pole it returned to the Tlingit people of Alaska under the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. Carved by the father-and-son team of Nathan and Stephen Jackson from a Western red cedar tree donated by the Tlingit, "the new pole is something of a post-modern creation," says Janet Hong, the museum’s project manager for exhibitions. —D.K.79 Hometown Masterpiece
Philadelphia had collective panic when it was announced that "The Gross Clinic" (1875), a masterpiece by native son Thomas Eakins, was to be sold jointly to The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and the soon-to-open Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas. The price: $68 million. The painting had been the property of Thomas Jefferson University, a Philadelphia medical school, since 1878, when it was purchased by alumni for $200. Wary of objections, the school gave local institutions 45 days to match the offer. The Philadelphia Museum of Art, in tandem with the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, rose to the challenge in November 2006, banding together with city officials and foundations to keep the masterwork by the lifelong Philadelphia resident from leaving. The 8-foot by 6½-foot painting, one of the largest and most complex Eakins ever did, was considered revolutionary at the time for its candid and gory presentation of a medical procedure. When it was exhibited in New York at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2002, art critic Michael Kimmelman called it "hands down, the finest 19th-century American painting." —D.K.
80 Pastoral Scene
In the early 20th century, German collector Franz Koenigs amassed a collection of more than 2,500 drawings. At Christie’s New York sale of Old Master works in January, one of six Koenigs drawings offered was Aelbert Cuyp’s "The Edge of a Wood with Two Figures and Two Sheep to the Right, Dunes Seen Beyond." It sold to the Louvre for $844,800. The black chalkwork dates to the early 1640s and is similar stylistically to a Cuyp drawing from the same period now in the British Museum. "It is a subtly colored and textured landscape," says Jennifer Wright, Christie’s Old Master drawing specialist. "Cuyp had wonderful facility with the brush." The landscape may also have symbolic value. The placing of a bare tree next to a verdant one, Wright suggests, may indicate the passage of time. —D.G.
81 Philadelphia Empire
Charles Carpenter Jr. was a collector of Tiffany silver and modern paintings, but he also had an eye for Philadelphia furniture, particularly a pair of early 19th-century mahogany armchairs. In September 2006, his heirs donated the chairs to Winterthur Museum in Wilmington, Delaware. Exquisitely carved with gracefully curving dolphin arm supports, today they would sell in the mid six figures at auction, experts say. Dating from 1815 to 1825, when the Empire style was fashionable, they are a part of a larger suite. They also carry a traceable provenance. In 1964 the chairs were offered for sale to New York antiques dealer Ginsburg & Levy by then-owner Daniel Coxe, who provided detailed information on the original owner, Philadelphia merchant George Harrison. "The chairs complement our already strong representation of Philadelphia classical furniture," says Wendy Cooper, Winterthur’s senior curator of furniture. —D.G.
82 Royal Sculpture
What are the chances that two significantly important bronze heads of an oba (king) of the kingdom of Benin, in present-day Nigeria, would make news within the same week? At Sotheby’s New York sale of African, Oceanic and Pre-Columbian art in May, an oba, deaccessioned from the Albright-Knox Gallery of Art in Buffalo, New York, soared to $4.74 million. The buyer was French dealer Bernard Dulon. Featuring a high collar of necklaces, a cap with clusters of beadwork and strands of beads in front of each ear, the head has a hole in the top designed to hold a carved elephant’s tusk, a symbol of the wealth and power of Benin’s kings. The oba dates from between 1575 and 1625, and only 10 others from this period are known to exist. It was acquired in 1932 by the French dealer Louis Carré before the then-called Albright Art Gallery purchased it in 1935. "The Benin head of an oba is a masterpiece and one of a set of four sculptures commissioned during the installation ceremonies of two successive kings of Benin whose reigns encompass the ‘renaissance’ of Benin art," says Heinrich Schweizer, head of Sotheby’s African, Oceanic and Pre-Columbian art department. A week earlier, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts announced the acquisition in April of an oba from 1550 to 1650, the "middle period" of Benin art (shown below). The later oba is a little more stylized than the one sold at Sotheby’s, according to museum director and president William Griswold. The work, which joins three other Benin objects in the MIA’s collection, was acquired from Parisian dealer Alain de Monbrison for a seven-figure sum. —D.G.
83 Mark Up
A stunning pink dominates the canvas considered the first fully realized effort of Mark Rothko’s mature style; indeed, it is a work in which he successfully articulated the painterly dialectic he would maintain throughout the remainder of his career. "White Center (Yellow, Pink and Lavender on Rose)" (1950) brought $72,800,000 in a May sale at Sotheby’s New York. The price not only was well above the pre-sale estimate of $40 million, but more than triple the previous world auction record for Rothko of $22,416,000 and a new benchmark for any contemporary work of art at auction. The buyer was anonymous, but the seller was the present-day patriarch of one of the nation’s most famous families, David Rockefeller. A renowned banker, collector and philanthropist, Rockefeller purchased the painting for less than $10,000 in 1960 at the urging of Dorothy Miller, a prominent curator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the institution co-founded by his mother, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller. The seller at that time was Eliza Bliss Parkinson, niece of Lillie P. Bliss, another MoMA co-founder. The striking 81-inch by 55 ½-inch painting, the first abstract work in Rockefeller’s collection, hung for many years in his office at Chase Manhattan Bank. Its luscious main colors looking like a refreshing trio of summer sorbets, "White Center" is "Rothko’s breakout picture, where he found his form and his identity," states Tobias Meyer, worldwide head of contemporary art for Sotheby’s. [For more on "White Center (Yellow, Pink and Lavender on Rose)," see John T. Spike’s commentary in Closer Look, Art&Antiques, October 2007, page 192.] —D.K.
84 Think Pink
"It simply is the most complicated wristwatch in the entire Patek Philippe line," says Julien Schaerer, auctioneer and watch director for Antiquorum USA in New York. The pink-gold Sky Moon Tourbillon, Patek Philippe Ref. 5002, produced in 2002, sold for $1,240,400 at an Antiquorum USA auction last June. The price was an auction record for any wristwatch ever sold in the United States. Among its distinctive capabilities, the watch has "a chiming minute repeater," notes Schaerer. "It can be activated to chime every minute, as well as every hour and quarter-hour. The sound is deeper than a typical watch chime and somewhat like a cathedral gong." The large watch, which measures 44 millimeters (1.72") in diameter, also has a retrograde date mechanism, "so that once it gets to 31, it automatically jumps back to one," Schaerer says. "It also has four small dials to indicate the month, the day, phases of the moon and the next leap year." —D.K.
85 For the Birds
Peter Blume, director of the Ball State University Museum of Art in Muncie, Indiana, relates a story about the Abstract Expressionist painter Lee Krasner. She was once asked by an interviewer why the word "bird" appeared in so many of her paintings. According to Blume, "Krasner responded, ‘I get a bird image. I get a floral image, but I don’t go around consciously thinking these images up. But they come through." Of the 12-foot by 6-foot "Right Bird Left" that the museum acquired as a donation in December 2006, Blume describes the painting has having "the impact of a tropical rain forest contained in a glass house. It is bursting with joyful psychic energy that seems too much to be contained within the confines of the canvas." The art museum received the gift from David T. Owsley, grandson of one of the university’s founders, Frank C. Ball. "This picture is comparable to one that the Cleveland Museum of Art bought at auction and paid a couple of a million dollars for," says Blume. "David trained as an art historian and he had owned this painting since the 1990s, and his giving it to our museum is all part of his family’s legacy." —D.M.86 All that Glitters
Sotheby’s New York jewelry department has a long history of offering pieces from private collections to be sold on behalf of worthy causes. In April a diamond pendant necklace suspending a pear-shaped diamond of 48.91 carats, owned by collector and philanthropist Florence Gould, who was known for her donations to American foundations, sold for $1.5 million. "It is a spectacular piece," says Lisa Hubbard, chairman of Sotheby’s jewelry department of the necklace. —D.G.
87 The Melonaire
Back in the smart-mouthed ’30s, a $5 bill was referred to as a "fin," $10 as a "sawbuck" and $100 as "C-note," but it was only in December 2006 that a rare $1,000 bill printed in 1890 and referred to as the "Grand Watermelon" suddenly became a topic of discussion. So called because of the green melon-like striping in the zeroes of the $1,000 denomination on the back of the note, a Grand Watermelon sold for $2,255,000 at Heritage Auction Galleries in Dallas. The price set a new world auction record for paper currency that was double the previous figure. "This was a red-seal Grand Watermelon and there is only one other known to exist—in the museum of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco," says Jim Fitzgerald, director of currency auctions at Heritage. "Altogether there were probably more than 1,000 Grand Watermelons printed, but most of these bore a brown seal." Brown-seal Grand Watermelons are also relatively rare, with less than three dozen extant examples. "The government stopped issuing $1,000 bills in the 1950s. Although still legal tender, they’re now worth more to collectors than they are as currency," he notes. —D.K.
88 Resurrecting Osiris
At some point between 1294 and 1279 B.C., it’s likely that a notable Egyptian priest was laid to rest in a temple tomb along with this wooden sculpture depicting him with Osiris, the god of resurrection. "Some of the finest sculptures the Egyptians created were of wood, but because so few are preserved, this medium is underappreciated and often overlooked," says Rita Freed, chair of the art of the ancient world at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, which purchased this sculpture from French dealer J. Kugel last December. The sum was undisclosed but would have to be at least in the low to mid-five figures, based on previous sale information of items from the period. "It is an object of superb quality of a material and scale that are rare," adds Freed. "It probably dates to the reign of Seti I, which was a time of great sensitivity and technical expertise." —D.M.
89 Astral Voyager
It’s not exactly something you could put on the mantel, but that did not stop a collector from buying a 78- by 59- by 14-inch model of the starship Enterprise-D for $576,000 at an auction held in October 2006 at Christie’s New York. The price was stratospherically above the pre-sale estimate of $25,000 to $35,000. The model had been used in the TV series "Star Trek: The Next Generation" (1987–94), which was the highest-rated of the seven "Star Trek" series, first aired in 1966. "The model was very dramatic-looking and quite intricate, with lots of detail," says Cathy Elkies, international director of iconic collections for Christie’s. "It was a so-called ‘hero’ piece, which means that it was actually used extensively on film." —D.K.
90 Mighty Words
At an April auction at Pook & Pook in Downingtown, Pennsylvania, a 5-inch-high pre–Revolutionary War ceramic teapot (not shown) sold to C.L. Prickett Antiques of Yardley, Pennsylvania, for $130,000. The inscription "No Stamp Act" appears on one side and "America: Liberty Restored" on the other, references to the tax imposed by the British in 1765 and repealed a year later. By the sheerest coincidence, a similar teapot surfaced at Northeast Auctions in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, last October. Originally owned by Connecticut Americana dealer William Guthman, it sold to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History for $99,450. "It’s a rare artifact, the only one of the four with red lettering. The others are dark black or blue," says Todd Prickett. "It’s also in phenomenal condition, just a couple of minor cracks and repaired spout." —D.G.
91 The Cobra Strikes
To some it’s the ultimate muscle car: incredibly fast, powerful, beautiful and endowed with an unrivalled pedigree. Automobile designer Carroll Shelby’s personal 1966 Shelby Cobra Super Snake was sold last January for $5.5 million at the 36th Annual Barrett-Jackson Collector Car Event in Scottsdale, Arizona, setting a world record for that model. The buyer was Ron Pratt, a well-known vintage-car collector in Chandler, Arizona. The seller, another well-known car collector, was Harley Cluxton III, of Scottsdale. A legendary race car driver, designer and manufacturer of cars, Shelby not only created the Cobra but conceived a Shelby Mustang for the Ford Motor Company, as well as sundry vehicles for the Chrysler Corporation. The dual supercharged 427 Cobra that he selected for himself was, in his words, intended to be "the fastest, meanest car on the road." The 800-hp dynamo has a super three-speed automatic transmission and reportedly is capable of reaching speeds of 180 to 190 mph. One of only 23 competition Cobra roadsters ever made, it was plucked from production by Shelby and molded into one of the most impressive automobiles ever built. Even its distinctive Viking-blue color is a custom shade that he developed. Referring to the 427 as "the King Kong of Cobras," Steve Davis, president of Barrett-Jackson Auction Company, explained that the number 427 "designated the size of the engine. It is 427 cubic inches. The car we sold was really the absolute epitome of what Shelby represented." —D.K.
92 Lust and Found
It was another one of those private sales that in recent years have sent frissons of awe through the art world. In November 2006, hedge-fund billionaire Steven A. Cohen, one of the most aggressive purchasers of contemporary and modern art, bought Willem de Kooning’s "Woman III" (1952–53) for roughly $137.5 million at a sale brokered by New York dealer Larry Gagosian. The seller was Hollywood film and record mogul David Geffen, and the price was more than quintuple de Kooning’s world auction record of $27.1 million, achieved that same month. "Woman III" was the last of the artist’s series of women paintings, which with their wild, slashing strokes often give female figures a menacing, almost demonic look. The paintings also had their satirical and even comic aspects: The artist himself once claimed he was burlesquing the characterizations of women in commercial illustrations, with their wide eyes, toothy smiles and oversized breasts. Jörn Merkert, a curator at the Academie der Künste, Berlin, where a major show of the artist’s works took place in the early 1980s, observed in a book issued in connection with the exhibition ("Willem de Kooning: Drawings, Paintings and Sculpture, 1983") that the expressive mode in de Kooning’s "paintings of women is love, lust, joy of life and sensual desire. His marriage … in 1943 offers but one key to understanding—another might have been youthful "memories of the brothels" of Amsterdam, where gaudily made-up girls sat ... behind windows, or stood in open doors ... hooking for love." —D.K.
93 Fashion Statement
Their forms were arresting, their size impressive and their colors as nuanced and elusive as the palette for a Calvin Klein fashion collection. No wonder the art aficionados who crowded into one of PaceWildenstein’s two Chelsea galleries last winter were so taken with Robert Mangold’s 12 10-foot-high Column Structure paintings. Each was priced around $200,000. "Column Structure II" (2006) was acquired prior to the show by the Tate Modern, London. The works combine "the classic elements of composition—shape, line and color—to create abstract works of architectural scale," says Douglas Baxter, PaceWildenstein’s president. The thick, thin and doubled lines drawn on their surfaces "push the boundaries of their structure, heightening tension by overlapping, diverging and mirroring each other’s ascent." —D.K.94 Quite a Dish
A pair of Regency silver-gilt sideboard dishes sold anonymously at Sotheby’s New York in May for an impressive $644,800 (est. $250,000–$350,000). At the center of the large circular dishes is a triumphant Amphitrite, female companion to Neptune, on a seashell chariot. The dishes were designed and executed by the royal goldsmiths Rundell, Bridge & Rundell, London, 1819, and were based on a design by the artist Thomas Stothard. While it is not known who commissioned them, among the possible clients are the Prince Regent (later King George IV) or his two brothers—the Duke of York and the Duke of Cumberland. "The dishes are monumental in scale [25-inch diameter], sculptural in their conception and superlative in their quality," says John Ward, a Sotheby’s silver specialist. —D.G.
95 Candid Camera
Giorgio De Chirico (lower left) wore a laurel wreath. Marcel Duchamp smoked a pipe, and Truman Capote knelt on a chair while wrapped in a cocoon of an overcoat. When Irving Penn took (and still takes) photographs of famous painters, sculptors, writers and musicians, the most unlikely or prosaic details can come to be the defining feature of the subject. In April, upon acquiring 35 portraits in a gift from Penn himself and an additional 32 as purchases, the Morgan Library & Museum’s director, Charles E. Pierce Jr., commented, "These remarkable works vividly capture the individual behind the art as only Mr. Penn can." Although values for Penn portraits vary widely depending on their subject, a 1984 print of his "Café in Lima" (1948), a fashion photo shoot for Vogue magazine, sold at a February 2007 Christie’s auction for $132,000. —D.M.
96 Indian Trade
The Delaware (or Lenape) people were often on the move. During the 18th and early 19th centuries, they occupied portions of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana and Missouri, and then, between 1830 and 1840, settled in Kansas. Sometime around 1830 a Delaware woman fashioned this bandolier bag, composed of corn-yellow, red, amber and blue glass beads, which featured a strap she made from a wool trade blanket that was then edged with a luminous red satin. A buyer at a farm auction in Ohio 20 years ago purchased the bag for $100. In September 2006, Cowan’s Auctions of Cincinnati, sold it to an unidentified buyer for $115,000. "The Delaware bandolier bag brought the price it did not only because of its craftsmanship, but because of the scarcity of such material from this area," says Danica M. Farnand, Cowan’s specialist in American Indian art. "Early American Indian objects from the east are highly desired due to the fact that many objects were taken to Europe and remain today in European museums and collections." —D.M.
97 Not Home Sweet Home
The colors are autumnal, the mood is somber, the lines redolent of the medieval and the modern. Egon Schiele’s "Einzelne Häuser (Häuser mit Bergen)" (c. 1915), is said to represent the artist’s mother’s hometown in what is now the Czech Republic, where Schiele himself lived briefly but not happily as an adult. The painting, "Individual Houses (Houses with Mountains)," with a fragment, "Monk I," on the verso, sold at Christie’s New York in November 2006 for $22,416,000, a world auction record for Schiele. "Schiele’s landscapes involve a strange and heady mixture of his own deeply personal references," says Conor Jordan, a senior vice-president and senior specialist in Impressionist and Modern art at Christie’s New York. —D.K.
98 Beauty From Sadness
The reviews are in on Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux’s "Mater Dolorosa" ("Our Lady of Sorrows"): "He knows the secret of making flesh palpitate and translating life." "A prodigious workman of marble, he knows how to make it vibrate under his nervous and nimble hand." "[The bust] represents the most striking expression of modern tendencies in sculpture." Although these remarks were written in 1870 when Capreaux exhibited this white marble bust at the Paris Salon, viewers today still would agree. The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, purchased the master work, regarded as Carpeaux’s last great marble, in December 2006 from a private dealer in New York for a sum that can be estimated, given previous sales of Carpeaux works, in the mid- to high six figures. According to contemporary accounts, the model for the bust was a woman Carpeaux encountered in a Parisian street. She was grieving for the death of her child and the artist took her to his studio where she served as the model for this bust—"a head in tears, face emaciated, with a sincere attitude of maternal sadness, and the true tears of a mother," as another writer of the day commented. —D.M.
99 Rhead Record
Frederick H. Rhead was a Staffordshire potter who immigrated to the United States in 1902 and as David Rago, head of Rago Arts and Auction Center in Lambertville, New Jersey, says, "became the Forrest Gump of American art pottery." Explaining his comment, Rago notes that Rhead was involved in many areas of pottery and worked for several companies, although he is probably best known as the English "father of Fiesta ware." Last March Rago sold a rare Rhead vase for a record price of $516,000. Made in Santa Barbara, California, around 1915, the 11-inch-high piece is etched with a stylized landscape. The buyer was Rudy Ciccarello, founder and president of the Two Red Roses Foundation, a Florida-based institution dedicated to the acquisition, exhibition and restoration of works from the American Arts and Crafts Movement. "The vase captures the languor and sensibility of the California plein-air artists working at the same time and place," says Rago. He also points out the vase was made entirely by Rhead’s own hand, with no work delegated to assistants. —D.G.
100 Keep Up with the Joneses
While on a trip to New York City a couple of years ago, Gail Andrews, director of the Birmingham Museum of Art, saw a circa-1785 Gilbert Stuart portrait of John Jones of Frankley on view at Richard L. Feigen & Co. When she returned home to the museum, she shared her enthusiasm with the museum staff, citing it as a particularly fine example of Stuart’s work in England while he was apprenticed to Benjamin West. "Because our director was so passionate about her desire to purchase the work for our collection, it was decided that its acquisition would be the perfect way to honor her 30 years at the museum," says Graham Boettcher, the museum’s curator of American art. And, so, in a surprise ceremony, the museum presented the work to Andrews, whereupon it entered the permanent collection. Although the purchase price was not revealed, full-scale Stuart portraits can easily approach $1 million. —D.M.