A 100-proof auction slate

Death, divorce and debt are the lifeblood of New York’s big art auction houses. When such troubles strike, art gets cashed in. As the 2003 spring auction high season unfolds over the next few weeks, it’s debt that’s providing most of the thrills.

Vivendi Universal, the French entertainment conglomerate that acquired a $15-million art collection in late 2000 with its purchase of Joseph E. Seagram & Sons, is selling the 2,500-piece collection as part of a plan to liquidate $11.7 billion in assets by 2004.

A belt-tightening measure, adopted last year amid falling stock prices and rising financial liabilities, decrees that the Picassos, Miros and Rothkos have to go, along with the Park Avenue penthouse apartment, the corporate jets and the Parisian soccer club. The action begins this weekend with a sale of photographs and continues through the big-ticket May sales into midsummer.

In purely financial terms, the Seagram sale is relatively minor. The entire collection is likely to yield less than the Cezanne self-portrait, also up for auction May 7 at Christie’s and valued at up to $20 million, or the Renoir painting of a woman in a garden that experts say may fetch as much as $30 million May 6 at Sotheby’s. But the dispersal of the Seagram collection will be closely watched because it will end a chapter of New York history and New York collecting.

When Vivendi purchased Seagram, the French firm took over a global beverage, entertainment and communications company headquartered in a landmark New York office tower. The 38-story structure at Park Avenue and 52nd Street -- which houses the Four Seasons restaurant on the ground floor -- is the first building in Manhattan designed by pioneering Modernist architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Working with Philip Johnson, he completed the distinctive skyscraper in 1958-59.

The Seagram art collection was assembled from the late 1950s to the ‘80s under the direction of Phyllis Lambert, the daughter of Seagram founder Samuel Bronfman. Lambert, who also persuaded her father to hire Mies and worked with him on the Seagram building while she was in her 20s, eventually became an architect and headed the Canadian Center for Architecture in Montreal from the late 1970s to 1999.

The best-known work in the Seagram collection is a 22-foot-high stage curtain painted by Pablo Picasso in 1919 for Sergei Diaghilev’s ballet “Le Tricorne.” It has hung between the two rooms of the Four Seasons since the building was finished. Other pieces, many of them displayed in offices, encompass a broad swath of art history in various media. There are paintings, tapestries and prints by modern and contemporary artists such as Jean Dubuffet, Joan Miro, Mark Rothko and Roy Lichtenstein; classic photographs by Walker Evans, Helen Levitt, Louis Faurer and Robert Frank; ancient European glass works; antique furniture and ceramics; and a large group of drinking vessels.

Vivendi’s decision to sell the collection has sparked objections, much as the recent auction of Surrealist artworks from the estate of poet Andre Breton in Paris. In that case, protesters accused the French government of shirking its duty to maintain the collection. Most of the concern about the dispersal of the Seagram collection focuses on the Picasso stage curtain.

“The Seagram building is such a masterpiece of modern architecture and so many people go there on architectural pilgrimage tours that it’s practically like a public space,” says Frank E. Sanchis, executive director of the Municipal Art Society of New York, a nonprofit organization that champions the preservation of historic landmarks and advocates excellence in urban design. The curtain, he continued, “has such a visible location that it is essentially part and parcel of the architecture. To take it away is really taking something away from the experience of being a New Yorker and being able to go through buildings where you see things like that.”

Vivendi’s plan to unload the collection also set off a bidding war at the auction houses. Phillips, de Pury & Luxembourg snagged the photographs, a cache of 720 works by 138 artists to be offered in a three-part sale this weekend. Estimated prices range from a low of $500 for a 1977 color photograph of a miniature golf course by Kenneth McGowan to a high of $150,000 for 14 color prints made in 1974 by William Eggleston, to be sold as a unit. The entire sale of photographs is expected to bring $1.4 million to $2.1 million.

The rest of the Seagram collection has been consigned to Christie’s, but many items will not appear in public sales. The Picasso curtain, a group of 48 drawings by sculptors and the collection of about 200 glass drinking vessels will be sold privately. The auction house has not issued estimates for these works and will not reveal their selling prices.

The arrangement reflects Vivendi’s wishes to find an appropriate place for the Picasso, which is very large and fragile, and to keep intact the collections of drawings and drinking vessels, Christie’s officials say.

Still, a vast array of Seagram material will be offered to the highest bidders at public auctions. Sixty-seven of the most valuable artworks will be incorporated into Christie’s sales of similar material consigned by various owners: prints on Tuesday, modern paintings and tapestries May 7-8, contemporary paintings May 14-15 and Latin American art May 28. Finally, a melange of fine art, artifacts and furniture -- some of which outfitted a private tavern on an upper floor of the Seagram building -- will go on the block July 23 in a sale devoted to the Seagram collection.

Meanwhile, the auction beat goes on in the usual marathon of sales. About $200 million worth of Impressionist and Modern art will be offered at Sotheby’s and Christie’s May 6-8; roughly the same dollar value of contemporary art will go on the block at Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Phillips May 13-16. In the current climate of fiscal restraint, many observers question the outcome of the sales, but there’s no shortage of shopping opportunities.

Edgar Degas collectors might consider his pastel drawing of a ballerina, valued at $9 million to $12 million, or his bronze “Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer” ($8 million to $12 million). Devotees of early 20th century abstraction have their choice of a Suprematist painting by Russian artist Kazimir Malevich ($5 million to $7 million) or “Composition in White, Blue, and Yellow” by Dutch painter Piet Mondrian ($6 million to $9 million).

In contemporary art, where prices increasingly approach or surpass the sums paid for Old Masters, Frank Stella’s 1959 black painting, “Bethlehem’s Hospital,” and Jackson Pollock’s drip painting, “Number 17, 1949,” can be had for an estimated $5 million to $7 million apiece. Robert Rauschenberg’s 1954 “combine” sculpture, “Minutiae,” a huge mixed-media piece, is valued at $6 million to $8 million.

For those with smaller bank accounts, there’s a mountain of fortune cookies by Feliz Gonzalez-Torres ($600,000 to $800,000), a drawing of the ocean’s surface by Vija Celmins ($200,000 to $300,000) and a metal silhouette of a donkey’s head by Jeff Koons ($18,000 to $25,000).