The Art World Shoots for a $1-Billion Spring : Auctions: New York’s selling season opens next week. African, American and Impressionist works may make it the biggest ever.

The art world is gearing up for what may be the biggest New York auction season in history. Beginning next week with the sale of a world renowned Los Angeles-based collection of of African art and steaming on through May with auctions of multimillion-dollar Impressionist and American paintings, the six-week round of auctions is likely to total close to $1 billion in sales.

Art on the block ranges from classical Impressionist works by Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Claude Monet to Pop paintings by Roy Lichtenstein and photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe. Los Angeles will play an unusually prominent role in the spring auctions when collections of the late dealer Harry A. Franklin, actor Kirk Douglas, pop singer Graham Nash, television producer David Wolper and the late Taft and Rita Schreiber are offered for sale.

Christie’s is looking forward to its most profitable auction in history, a May 15 sale of 81 Impressionist and modern works that are expected to total as much as $331.4 million. Sixty-two of the pieces are valued at more than $1 million each, and five are expected to bring more than $10 million each.

Sotheby’s is anticipating nearly as big a success the next night, with a sale of 71 Impressionist and modern works, valued at up to $303.5 million. Sixty-one are likely to top the $1-million mark, and three are expected to exceed $10 million.

Two highly revered Impressionist paintings--Vincent van Gogh’s “Portrait of Dr. Gachet,” depicting the physician who treated the troubled artist during the last year of his life, and Renoir’s “Au Moulin de la Galette,” a shimmering painting of an outdoor dance hall scene--are expected to bring $40 million to $50 million apiece and possibly exceed the record $53.9 million paid in 1987 for Van Gogh’s “Irises,” now in the collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum.

The Van Gogh portrait, to be offered by Christie’s, and the Renoir, from Sotheby’s, will be the most closely watched sales of the season. But they are far from the only big-ticket items.

Edouard Manet’s intimate garden scene, “The Bench,” for example, is estimated at $20 million to $25 million in Christie’s May 15 sale. Thomas Eakins’ “The Swimming Hole,” an icon of American art from the Fort Worth Modern Art Museum’s collection, is valued at $10 million to $15 million in a May 24 auction at Sotheby’s.

Major contemporary works are also lining up for spring auctions. In Christie’s big contemporary sale on May 7, for example, 76 lots are valued at a total of $49 million to $71 million, the auction house’s highest ever pre-sale estimate for contemporary art. Nineteen of the 76 works are likely to fetch more than $1 million apiece; half of them are Abstract Expressionist paintings by Clyfford Still, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko and Sam Francis. Sotheby’s contemporary sale on May 8 includes 88 lots, expected to total between $88 million and $115 million. Fifteen pieces are valued at over $1 million.

Among pricey contemporary pieces offered by the two auction houses, Lichtenstein’s classic comic strip-style painting, “Kiss II,” and Francis Bacon’s Expressionistic “Study for Portrait” are each expected to bring between $5 million and $7 million. “Woman as Landscape,” a 1954-55 Abstract Expressionist work by De Kooning, is valued at $9 million to $12 million.

No one can predict the outcome of these glittering auctions. Some critics of the highly leveraged sale of “Irises” in 1987 to Australian industrialist Alan Bond say that it may be several years before another artwork commands a higher price.

But confidence in the art market--as well as dismay over escalating prices--is widespread among dealers and collectors. While most of them say that buyers are becoming more selective and that the fast-rising prices for works by young art stars will level off, they expect top-quality pieces to climb even higher. Highlights of upcoming sales released so far by the auction houses indicate that there will be no shortage of quality for those who can afford it.

As usual, the sales include consignments from collectors and museums all across the country, including Southern California, but Los Angeles has an unusually high profile this spring. Works from at least five important Los Angeles collections will go on the block in April and May.

* The Harry A. Franklin Family Collection of African Art comes up first, on April 21 at Sotheby’s. Billed as the biggest and best single-owner sale of African art since the 1966 auction of Helena Rubenstein’s collection, the Franklin auction of 431 lots is expected to total between $3.8 million and $5.4 million. The top lot is a Cameroon wood sculpture, called the “Bangwa Queen,” which is valued at up to $1.8 million and may challenge the $2.08-million record for African art, set last July for a Benin bronze head.

Franklin was a pioneering collector of African art who bought his first piece in 1938 and maintained a gallery in Beverly Hills until his death in 1983. His daughter, Valerie Franklin, who ran the gallery in later years and brought her scholarly expertise to the family business, decided to sell the collection so that she could launch a new career as a writer.

* Rock singer Graham Nash’s celebrated collection of photography will be sold on April 25 at Sotheby’s, which calls the event “the most important single-owner sale of photography ever to come to auction.” The sale of about 475 photographs, including works by Ansel Adams, Diane Arbus, Walker Evans and Edward Weston, is expected to bring more than $2 million. Nash will donate half the profit to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art for the purchase of contemporary photography. The money gift will augment the singer’s recent donation of 140 contemporary photographs to the museum.

* Actor Kirk Douglas and his wife, Anne, will sell 52 pieces of Impressionist and modern art in Christie’s auctions on May 4, 16, 22 and 30. Their collection of works by Georges Braque, Marc Chagall, Piet Mondrian and many other artists is expected to bring $7.5 million to $10.7 million. The couple plan to put half their profit into a family foundation and use the rest to collect contemporary art.

* Christie’s will sell 17 works from the estate of Taft and Rita Schreiber on May 7, 8, 15 and 16 for a projected total of $4.8 million to $7.1 million. The most valuable pieces are “Woman With Blue Jewel,” a 1937 painting by Henri Matisse ($4 million to $6 million) and Henry Moore’s bronze “Girl Seated” ($500,000 to $700,000). The Schreibers bequeathed the bulk of their collection to the National Gallery in Washington, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Taft Schreiber was a top official with MCA Inc. His widow died last year. Their daughter, Lenore Greenberg, a MOCA board member, said that the items sent to auction are those that her parents didn’t designate as gifts to museums or family members.

* Producer David Wolper will sell seven modern artworks from his collection at Christie’s auctions on May 1, 15 and 16 and in October. The group of sculptures and paintings by Pablo Picasso, Jacques Lipchitz and Joan Miro is expected to total between $4.4 million and $6.3 million. An active collector who routinely buys and sells, Wolper says he will use the profit from the upcoming auctions to purchase more art.

Several other collections are scheduled for sale in May. An unusually rich cache of Italian Futurist art, collected by the late Lydia Winston Malbin, the eldest daughter of architect Albert Kahn, will be offered by Sotheby’s on May 16 and 17. The sale--expected to total $57 million to $75 million-- will include Giacomo Balla’s painting, “Injection of Futurism” ($3 million to $4 million) and his sculpture, “Boccioni’s Fist” ($2 million to $3 million). Among other modern works in the Malbin collection are Constantin Brancusi’s sculpture, “The Blond Negress” ($8 million to $10 million) and Fernand Leger’s 1913 Cubist painting, “Woman in Armchair” ($10 million to $12 million).

Christie’s on May 15 will offer five paintings from the estate of Robert Lehman, a New York financier and patron of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, for an estimated total of $40 million to $60 million. The works include a Van Gogh self-portrait ($20 million to $30 million) and an Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec portrait of a young woman, “Girl With Fur” ($10 million to $15 million).

Paintings continue to command the art market’s top prices, but photography will be in the spotlight late this month. Christie’s will launch a four-day round of sales on April 23 with an auction of photographic masterworks, featuring vintage works that are expected to set records. Sotheby’s will follow its April 25 auction of the Graham Nash collection with a sale of 473 photographs. The auction will close with 36 works by Robert Mapplethorpe valued at up to $50,000 apiece--well above his record of $38,500 set only last November.

BACKGROUND

Pre-sale estimates for this spring’s round of art auctions indicate that the art boom of the 1980s may be carrying over into the ‘90s. The art market took off in the ‘80s as thousands of new collectors began putting money into art and the Japanese spent vast sums on French Impressionist paintings. Skeptics feared a collapse after the stock market crash of October, 1987, but a month later Sotheby’s sale of Vincent Van Gogh’s “Irises” commanded $53.9 million, still the highest auction price ever paid for an artwork. The revelation that Sotheby’s had loaned Australian entrepreneur Alan Bond half the purchase price led critics to charge that the market was artificially inflated and to predict a decline. Subsequent auctions haven’t matched that price, but prices have held strong and continued to rise steadily in many areas. Sotheby’s reported $2.9 billion in sales for 1989, a 61% increase over 1988. Christie’s totalled $2 billion in sales in 1989, a 70% jump from the previous year. Both auction houses expect 1990 to be another record year, but some art market watchers say business might be hurt by this year’s fall of the Japanese stock market and the continuing troubles in the junk bond market.