Banking on big names

The star of New York’s spring auction season is “Boy With a Pipe,” a portrait of a melancholy youth from Pablo Picasso’s much-loved Rose Period. Sotheby’s expects the painting to fetch $70 million. Word on the street is that it might go higher, possibly surpassing the $82.5 million paid in 1990 for Vincent van Gogh’s “Portrait of Dr. Gachet,” the most expensive painting ever sold at auction.

Picasso’s sweet, sad portrait of a 16-year-old in a blue laborer’s uniform, crowned by a floral wreath and holding a pipe, has a lot going for it. A haunting image of adolescent vulnerability and beauty, painted in 1905 when the artist was 24, it’s an early indicator of talent that would explode into a force like no other.

But there’s something else about “Boy With a Pipe” -- its provenance, or record of ownership. The painting was consigned by the estate of John Hay Whitney and Betsey Cushing Roosevelt Whitney, illustrious New York collectors who purchased it half a century ago. When it comes to marketability, nothing beats the artist’s name and the work’s quality, but an owner’s imprimatur can add real, if un-quantifiable, value.

“There is no way to measure it,” says Charles Moffett, co-chairman of Sotheby’s Impressionist and Modern art department. “But when the material is of high quality, it hasn’t been on the market for a long time, and it has the benefit of having been selected and kept by a major collector, people buy with a lot more confidence than they might otherwise, especially those who are not seasoned collectors.”

The gavel will fall on the Picasso on Wednesday night in a $140-million sale of art from the Whitney estate. That sale is the most spectacular aspect of the semiannual ritual that draws an international coterie of collectors and dealers to New York auction houses. More than $500 million worth of Impressionist, Modern and contemporary art will be offered in a series of sales, Tuesday through May 14 at Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Phillips.

But Whitney isn’t the only owner’s name that auction houses are banking on. Sotheby’s Impressionist and Modern art auction Thursday night includes a painting of waterlilies by Claude Monet, valued at $9 million to $12 million, and five other works from the estate of Hollywood producer Ray Stark and his wife, Frances Brice Stark. A group of Cubist paintings -- most notably Spanish artist Juan Gris’ “The Marble Console,” with an estimated price of $4.5 million to $6.5 million -- is from the estate of Tulsa, Okla., philanthropist Ruth G. Hardman.

The cachet of ownership

A sterling provenance, such as these names provide, can help to create “an aura,” Moffett says. In the case of the Picasso, the glow is heightened by collectors who were the American art world’s equivalent of royalty.

John Hay Whitney, who died in 1982, made his mark in business as a venture capitalist and publisher of the New York Herald Tribune, and distinguished himself in other realms with the help of family connections. The grandson of John Hay, secretary of State under Presidents William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt, Whitney was U.S. ambassador to Britain during the Eisenhower administration. He was the nephew of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, who founded the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and began collecting art as a Yale University student. Whitney also was a longtime trustee of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

His wife, Betsey, who died in 1998, was one of three daughters of a prominent Boston physician who were known for their beauty, charm and ability to marry well. She wed Whitney in 1942 after divorcing her first husband, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s son James.

As a couple, the Whitneys collected Impressionist and Modern art and installed it in five homes, including Greentree, a huge estate in Manhasset, N.Y. They gave some of the land for a community park and public services, but a 400-acre property is maintained as the home of the Greentree Foundation, established by Betsey Whitney after the death of her husband to promote peace, human rights and international cooperation. Proceeds from the May auction will benefit the foundation.

If “Boy With a Pipe” meets or surpasses the estimated selling price, it will be just one more Whitney success at Sotheby’s.

“Irises,” a Van Gogh painting that commanded $53.9 million in 1987 and now is in the collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum, was sold by John Whitney Payson, a nephew of John Hay Whitney. Picasso’s “Au Lapin Agile,” which brought $40.7 million in 1989, came from Payson’s sister, Linda de Roulet. The buyer, Walter Annenberg, gave it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

“Au Moulin de la Galette,” an iconic Impressionist painting by Pierre Auguste Renoir, was consigned by Betsey Whitney in 1990 and sold for $78.1 million. In 1999, the year after she died, Sotheby’s racked up $128.3 million for 50 works from the Whitney collection and sold George Bellows’ “Polo Crowd” separately for $27.5 million.

At Christie’s, much of the excitement comes from paintings consigned by the Museum of Modern Art to benefit its acquisition fund.

“With these consignments, one has the double benefit of a wonderful provenance and fabulous works, even though the museum has better ones,” says Christopher Eykyn, head of Impressionist and Modern art. “Only a museum with extraordinarily deep holdings could even contemplate de-accessioning such paintings.”

Still, he advises clients to look beyond MoMA’s seal of approval to the previous owners.

“Il grande metafisico” by Giorgio De Chirico, valued at $7 million to $10 million, was donated in 1958 by Philip Goodwin, a MoMA trustee and an architect of the museum’s original building. “Prior to that, the painting was owned by Albert Barnes of the Barnes Foundation,” Eykyn says. “You are looking at three very illustrious names. When those are combined with a work of such quality and rarity, I think it’s a winning combination.”

“Ultimately a painting sells based on its merits -- the quality of the work, whether it stems from the artist’s greatest period, the condition of the work, whether it has been on the market recently,” Eykyn says. “But clients like to feel vindication of their taste. To be able to say a work has been in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art the last 40 or 50 years achieves that.”

Amy Cappellazzo, Christie’s chief of Post-War and Contemporary art, also has MoMA consignments -- a small drip painting by Jackson Pollock, valued at $5 million to $7 million, and a painting of a cow by Jean Dubuffet, expected to fetch $2.5 million to $3.5 million.

“The MoMA provenance adds cachet for sure,” she says. The relatively obscure Anderson Fine Arts Center in Anderson, Ind. -- which hopes to reap $1.8 million to $2.5 million from the sale of Edward Ruscha’s 1964 painting “Damage,” donated to the center in 1972-- doesn’t have the same effect. But the Anderson name can’t hurt, even though some of the proceeds are likely to fund operations not condoned by the American Assn. of Museums’ code of ethics.

Anderson director Deborah Stapleton says a portion of the money will be used for art acquisitions and collections care, as stipulated by the code, but the board will decide exactly how to distribute the funds after the auction.

“To know that something was in a good collection or off the market for a long time is a talking point,” Cappellazzo says. “In terms of actual bids or price, I can’t say what it means, but it’s certainly better than knowing the work was at a dealer’s booth at the last art fair.”

Consigners who don’t want to be identified sometimes list their art as “property from a private collection” to indicate that the work hasn’t been languishing in a dealer’s storage bin. People in the trade often can determine the name of the owner -- and feel smug about their knowledge.

“I think it’s sort of cool,” Cappellazzo says, “when the catalog just says something like ‘property of an American collector,’ but it turns out to be someone dynamic and everybody knows and it’s all the chatter. There’s a little allure for the cognoscenti. It’s a little sexier.”

Who owns what, when and why has always been of interest to collectors, curators and art historians. The restitution of Nazi loot has heightened awareness of provenance, auction house officials say, but concern about legal issues is only part of the urge to chart the travels of art. The story of an artwork’s ownership reflects history and cultural values well beyond the artist’s studio.

“The Whitney pictures,” Moffett says, “are part of American history and American collecting.”