Big in D.C. & A Boesky Discovery

Welcome back to Wall Power. I’m Marion Maneker.

I was in Washington, D.C., late last week for Puck’s party with WME and Snap at the Riggs hotel, where I got to meet many of my new partners. Peter Hamby and Matt Belloni interviewed Aaron Sorkin onstage at the party, and you can check out the conversation on Matt’s podcast, The Town. Sorkin announced that his next project will be a treatment of January 6.

Few think of Washington as an art destination, but the city has a mother lode of museums. The National Gallery (both wings) and the Hirshhorn lead the pack as major art museums. But the hot ticket in town right now is the Pierre Bonnard exhibition at the Phillips Collection. So I made time to see the show and grab a quick lunch with Phillips’ new-ish C.E.O. and director, Jonathan Binstock, who explained how the Bonnard show fits into his museum’s mission.

We’ve also got some last-minute collection announcements from Sotheby’s and Christie’s before we get to see the auction catalogs early this week. One dealer who will be hitting refresh on the auction websites is Marianne Boesky. Her show of Danielle McKinney’s new work that closed on Saturday has been all over Instagram. Boesky has been trying to impose order on McKinney’s market since two works sold last year for prices in the six figures. This week, we’ll see if she’s kept her clamps on the flippers.

• Gigaweek approaches: We don’t have the numbers yet, but all of the auctions this May will take place during the week of May 13. Last year, $1.8 billion in art was sold. (That’s why we call it Gigaweek.) This time around, there are no large collections on the market that require their own sales, so totals are likely to be down even further from last year. That caveat accepted, the auctions have been assembled “brick by brick,” in the words of Sotheby’s David Galperin. That means we’re likely to get more and better market indicators. Without large collections, the specialists are relying on their own market intelligence to source and sell lots.
• There’s going to be a lot of art in New York for the next three weeks: Before we get to the auctions, there are three important art fairs that will take place in New York. “Our business is cyclical, and May is a peak,” David Zwirner told the Times last week. “This is the time they are forced into making decisions.” Frieze New York opens on Wednesday, May 1, at The Shed in Hudson Yards, where Thomas Heatherwick’s shuttered Vessel hopes to reopen later this year. A week and a day later, the much-watched Independent opens in Tribeca, followed by TEFAF New York at the Park Avenue Armory.
• A $45 million collection of Impressionist works at Sotheby’s: Sotheby’s is offering a single-owner collection with works by Childe Hassam, Camille Pissarro, and Claude Monet along with an early Picasso bullfighting scene in their Modern Evening auction on May 15. The top lots have a combined estimate of nearly $45 million, but the bulk of that value lies in a Monet painting of grainstacks, titled Meules à Giverny, from 1893. Monet’s series of grainstacks have sold for increasingly high prices in recent years, culminating in the $110 million paid by SAP co-founder Hasso Plattner in 2019. Another Meule painting made $81 million three years before. This work is not one of the series paintings. It was made a couple of years later, which explains the relatively modest $30 million estimate.

  Another Monet once owned by John Singer Sargent, a plein air painting of trees made near Bennecourt in 1887, is being offered with a $6 million estimate. The work has been in this collection for nearly 40 years. Picasso’s Courses de taureaux, from 1901, has a $5 million estimate. And a Pissarro landscape painting, Paysage aux Patis, Pontoise, la moisson, from 1873, is offered with a $2.5 million estimate.

• Klimt anti-climax: Vienna auction house im Kinsky sold a recently rediscovered Gustav Klimt portrait of a Miss Lieser (her exact identity is uncertain) early last week for $41 million. That’s the sixth-highest auction price for a Klimt, but it remains unclear whether the small regional auction house—Austria isn’t the most vibrant art-trading hub this century—was able to attract enough of the right bidders to make a good price. The buyer was Patti Wong, Sotheby’s former Hong Kong heavyweight who is now an advisor to some of the richest collectors in Asia. But the auction itself saw little to no bidding.

  Was money left on the table? We’ll know that if the work ever trades publicly again. Few Klimts sell these days. Those that do go for a range of high prices. Dmitry Rybolovlev famously paid more than $183 million for Water Serpents II, which has since been resold ($170 million is the figure bandied about) to Rosaline Wong, supposedly for Hong Kong’s embattled Joseph Lau. Last year, Klimt’s Lady With a Fan sold for $108 million in London. Patti Wong was also the buyer of that work (and some of the other bidders appeared to be representing Asian clients). The year before, Paul Allen’s Klimt, a Birch Forest painting, sold for $104 million. There are now two tiers of pricing for important Klimt works, the nine-figure works and a smattering of very good works sold at prices mostly just below $50 million. The Lieser portrait made a solid but not impressive price within that range. Since the right players in that market—namely, Wong—were present in the bidding, I’d have to guess that the economic mood in Asia had more to do with the price than where it was sold.

Bonnard’s market appeal has waned in recent years. His colorful work is more associated with the aftereffects of Impressionism and early Modern movements, even though there are a range of Contemporary artists who work with color palettes akin to his. When Paul Allen’s art was sold a year and a half ago, his prized Bonnard—Deux corbeilles de fruits, from 1935—made $6.66 million. That might seem like a strong price. But Allen had purchased the work for $8.5 million in 2006. When you adjust for inflation, the painting lost half its value in 16 years. (Though there was a record auction price of $19.5 million made for one of his large terrace views just five years ago.)

Despite being somewhat out of favor, Bonnard has been gaining visibility in museum and gallery shows over the last half-dozen years. Bonnard’s Worlds was organized by the Kimbell in Fort Worth after that museum’s 2018 acquisition of the painter’s large Landscape at Le Cannet, from 1928. The Kimbell wanted to put on a show that would illustrate the quality of its acquisition and the importance of the work. But museum time runs a bit slower, especially when a pandemic intervenes. It takes a while to get loans from museums like the Phillips, the National Gallery, and the Musée d’Orsay. Several of the works included in the show at the Phillips were also in another Bonnard show, Pierre Bonnard: The Colour of Memory, that was at the Tate Modern in London in 2019. (Museum shows are also a way for collectors to communicate their status. For instance, private equity investor Christopher Flowers and his wife are identified as the owners of the Paul Allen painting, which is on display here.)

An intimate museum like the Phillips can only organize a show on the scale of Bonnard’s Worlds on a manageable rhythm of “perhaps every two years.” All museums, Binstock says, are facing cost increases of 20 percent “across the board.” Adding more visitor traffic won’t cover the costs simply because the museum, still housed partially in the Duncan Phillips mansion, has small galleries. There’s a physical limit to the number of visitors the museum can accommodate. “A well-attended show lifts revenue lines across the institution,” Binstock said. “It’s not just about ticket sales. It’s about building the audience with new guests, adding new members, and reaching deeper into under-tapped segments of the population for visitorship and support.”

To meet his budget, Binstock needs to increase his membership base. That happens, in part, with a buzzy show like the Bonnards, on view until June 2. But it also happens through programming, like the adjacent single-gallery show of Jennifer Bartlett’s In the Garden series and an installation of two recently conserved works by Paul Cézanne installed alongside five other works by the artist. Like Bonnard, the Phillips has deep holdings of Cézanne. The museum now thinks of both artists as “units.” (Jacob Lawrence, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Mark Rothko are some of the other units.) “Going forward,” the new-ish director said, “you can expect that the Phillips will be growing its collection of units and its attendant family of closely associated artists.”

All museums are under pressure to expand their audience in numbers and demographic range. That’s especially true in a city like Washington. The most important thing about the Bonnard show, however, is that “the data so far indicate that we are finally on the other side of Covid,” Binstock said. “It’s taken this long. All the figures are up, including visitors, new memberships, shop and café sales, and even sponsorships for the show itself, which set a new fundraising record for a temporary exhibition at the Phillips.”

McKinney, who goes by Joy, is a mid-career artist, but she only took up painting during the pandemic lockdown. Trained as a photographer, her paintings were first executed in acrylics until she switched to oils. I point that out only to reinforce how new McKinney is to working as a painter. She’s still experimenting and fine-tuning her skills. That said, her work emerged on the market in 2021 at a series of gallery shows in New York, Los Angeles, and Aspen. The last of those shows was with Boesky. The next year, Boesky showed her on 24th Street in Chelsea. Now this brief show, Quiet Storm, has reminded everyone of last year’s brief market flurry.

With asking prices ranging from $25,000 to $90,000, there’s not a high barrier for buyers. That doesn’t mean Boesky will sell to anyone who asks, even her own best clients. She needs work to go into as many museums as possible—which will establish McKinney’s reputation—so she has to hold paintings aside for them. So far, 17 museums have acquired works including the Buffalo AKG, Dallas Museum of Art, Hirshhorn in D.C., Houston’s MFA, The Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Stedelijk in Amsterdam. After the museums come good clients who have supported Boesky in the past. Boesky will also look for collectors she believes will really stick with the artist.

With the show now closed, Boesky will learn how successful she’s been at tamping down McKinney’s market. If one of the auction houses has persuaded the owner of one of her works to consign, we could see more prices at auction well above the primary prices. That, in turn, might spur more early collectors to break ranks.

Boesky wants to keep things from getting out of hand at least until the artist has established herself with deep enough demand to maintain stable prices even through market downturns. The goal is to be long-term greedy. The success of Quiet Storm hasn’t really helped matters. Boesky thinks it used to take 10 years to bring an artist from a strong debut to a stable, high-value market. But with the way that Instagram has increased the visibility of artists, Boesky thinks the cycle is now down to three years.