Cashing In on a Seller’s Art Market

Who is cashing in on art at New York’s upcoming round of big-ticket auctions and why are these collectors unloading their treasures?

Most of the sellers aren’t telling.

While the auction houses thrive on highly publicized “single owner” sales featuring celebrated collections, the majority of items listed in auction catalogs are sold anonymously. In the catalogue for Christie’s May 3 sale of contemporary art, for example, owners of only 11 of the 64 items offered are identified. In a comparable sale of 85 lots, on May 2 at Sotheby’s, owners of only 18 works are named.

Secrecy is essential in a business that prides itself on protecting the privacy of clients who don’t want publicity about their financial affairs. But a survey of May auctions suggests several categories of sellers:

-- Private collectors who plunge into a bull market when their taste has changed or their passion for the chase has cooled. Los Angeles collector Max Palevsky, for one, is selling “Shot Red Marilyn,” a striking painting of Marilyn Monroe by Andy Warhol. The 1964 silk-screened canvas, valued at $1.5 million to $2 million, is for sale on May 3 at Christie’s.

“It’s the best Pop image,” Palevsky said. “It’s a vacuum. It’s empty. It’s completely blank, and that’s what Warhol’s art is about.”

Why sell such a quintessential Warhol?

“It’s a very good time” in the market, Palevsky said, referring to the artist’s death in 1987 and his current retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. Furthermore, the portrait “is not a picture that I’m attached to.” A set of eight variously colored “Marilyn” lithographs in his collection suit him better than the painting because “the repetition and changes in tonalities in the lithographs moderate the vacuity that’s so hard to live with,” said the collector whose acquisitive interests have shifted to Japanese prints and Arts-and-Crafts-period objects.

A 1949 triptych by Jackson Pollock from the Los Angeles collection of Betty W. and Stanley K. Sheinbaum will go on the block in the same sale. Christie’s expects the three panels to bring between $1.5 million and $2 million. The couple, who no longer collect contemporary art, decided to sell their Pollock as part of an attempt to “simplify” their lives and to make room for other artworks, Betty W. Sheinbaum said.

-- Avid collectors who have been priced out of a rapidly escalating area of the market, some of whom sell their collections to finance their habit in less expensive territory. One example is Sotheby’s May 9 auction of eight Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works, valued at $55.7 million to $66.8 million, from the collection of Jaime Ortiz-Patino, a grandson of Simon I. Patino, who made a fortune in the tin mines of Bolivia. Ortiz-Patino said in a press release that he got into the Impressionist market too late and will use proceeds of the sale to acquire paintings from less expensive periods as well as silver, rare books and manuscripts.

Another is a $20-million sale of 17 landscape paintings, May 10 at Christie’s, from a collection formed by the founders of G.D. Searle & Co. pharmaceuticals. The decision to sell “reflects the fact that the market in those areas of the greatest interest to us, Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings, has outpaced our collecting resources,” said Daniel Crow Searle in a prepared statement issued by the auction house.

-- Museums that are pressured to marshal their resources as they attempt to build distinctive collections. The Newport Harbor Art Museum, which concentrates on post-war California art, is selling an 11-foot-by-9-foot painting of a palm tree by East Coast artist Jim Dine, valued at $70,000 to $100,000. The museum is selling the work because it already has a better example of Dine’s work than the atypical “Palm Tree” (which was commissioned for the Newporter Resort and given to the museum when the hotel changed hands), said museum director Kevin Consey. Proceeds from the sale can be used to buy one or more works that are better suited to the collection, Consey said.

Several other museums are auctioning works to benefit their acquisitions funds, which can’t easily cope with today’s prices. Sotheby’s May 9 and 10 sale of Impressionist and modern art, for example, offers a Dresden landscape by Oskar Kokoschka and a Paris street scene by Kees van Dongen from the Art Institute of Chicago, two Renoirs from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and five works from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, including a small portrait by Henri Matisse and a Chaim Soutine still life.

In the same auction, the Walker Art Center in Milwaukee is selling a bronze portrait of Rembrandt by late 19th- and early 20th-Century French artist Emile-Antoine Bourdelle to establish a purchase fund for contemporary art.

-- Charitable foundations with significant art assets that suddenly seem too valuable to keep. Two current examples have disappointed museums by removing long-term loans and hoped-for gifts from their walls. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art lost the late film producer Hal B. Wallis’ collection of Impressionist art, put on loan there two years ago but now slated for sale May 10 at Christie’s. The collection of nine paintings, valued at more than $20 million, is being sold to support medical research and conservation of natural resources.

“Portrait of Duke Cosimo I de’Medici” by Jacopo da Carucci, a Florentine Mannerist known as Pontormo, which had hung for 19 years at the Frick Collection in Manhattan, will go on the block on May 31 at Christie’s. Proceeds from the sale, expected to exceed $20 million, will go to the Homeland Foundation. The late Chancey Devereaux Stillman, the painting’s owner, established the foundation to benefit Wethersfield House (his estate, now open to the public) and Catholic welfare and education programs.

-- Heirs of collectors, some of whom have left instructions for their collections to be sold. Two groups of contemporary art offered on May 2 at Sotheby’s fit this category: the Los Angeles-based collection of land developer Edwin Janss Jr. ($8.9 million to $11.5 million) and 19 pieces of Pop art from the collection of German industrialist Karl Stroher ($3 million to $3.9 million). In the same sale, Pollock’s “Number 19,” a 1949 drip painting billed as “the most important Pollock to come to auction,” will be sold from the estate of Baltimore collector Israel Rosen. Sotheby’s has valued the work at $3 million to $4.5 million, just under the artist’s record of $4.8 million, set last May.

May and November mark the high tides of New York art auctions. This year, during the first two weeks of May, Christie’s and Sotheby’s will offer an estimated $85.9 million to $113.1 million worth of contemporary art and $317.2 million to $422.5 million of Impressionist and modern art. The Pontormo portrait will go on the block May 31 in a sale of Old Master paintings.

Highlights of Sotheby’s contemporary auction are the May 2 sales of the Janss and Stroher collections. The spotlight of Sotheby’s May 9 Impressionist and modern sale is on the Ortiz-Patino collection.

The May 10 sale of the Wallis and Searle collections are the big events for Christie’s in the first half of the month, but talk about that auction is likely to fade by May 31, when the Pontormo goes under the gavel.

Meanwhile, auction watchers continue to wonder how much higher prices can rise and if there is any top of a market that has already left museums on the sidelines. Answers are not to be found by consulting the stock market or even the general economic climate because “art objects are unique and the art market is driven by the objects,” said John L. Marion, chairman of Sotheby’s.

One must know what’s coming up for sale in future auctions to predict the health of the art market, Marion said. “What’s in the pipeline now is pretty incredible. I don’t look for any slackening at all.”