Volume II
Issue IV
In This Issue
GURR JOHNS INTRODUCES NEW TEAM
MEMBER
YEAR IN REVIEW: HOW THE ART MARKET
MOVED IN 2014
February 2015
WOMEN ARE (SLOWLY) CATCHING UP
GURR JOHNS INTRODUCES NEW TEAM
MEMBER
We are pleased to announce that
Jennifer Vorbach will be consulting with Gurr
Johns on our global brokerage business and will
be based in our New York office.
Jennifer has over 20 years of experience in the
art world as an advisor, dealer and Christie's
specialist and auctioneer. Jennifer began her
career at Christie's New York, where she
subsequently became department head, and in
2005, International Director of the Post-War
and Contemporary department at Christie's
Geneva. Additionally, Jennifer worked as the
Contemporary specialist for Citibank's Art
Advisory Service. There, she advised collectors from the US, South America,
Europe and Asia on the purchase and sale of art. In 1992, Jennifer joined C+M
ARTS as the gallery's director where she became partner in 1996.
Jennifer was born in Paris and raised in Geneva, and earned an art history
degree with honors from Mount Holyoke College, Massachusetts. English and
French are her native languages and she has good command of German and
Italian. Based in New York, she divides her time between the US and Europe.
She has contributed to Whitewall Magazine, and is a trustee of the Augustus
Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site and Mount Holyoke College Museum of
Art. She serves as a volunteer auctioneer for charities in the U.S. and Geneva. YEAR IN REVIEW: HOW THE ART MARKET
MOVED IN 2014
Looking back, 2014 was a dynamite year for the art market. At the top,
Christie's achieved the biggest sales total to date - $853 million - at an art
auction, while emerging markets sprouted up in all corners of the globe, from
Romania to the MINT nations of Nigeria and Mexico. Here are a few other
trends we noticed throughout the year that was, plus one prediction for 2015.
WOMEN ARE (SLOWLY) CATCHING UP
Auction prices for works of art made by women
still lag woefully behind records set by their male
counterparts. Indeed, not one of the year's top 10
auction lots went to a female artist. Still, one major
stride was made in November when Sotheby's sold
Georgia O'Keeffe's 1932 painting "Jimson Weed,
White Flower No. 1," for $44.4 million. That figure
leaps four-fold from the previous record for a
female artist: $11.9 million for an untitled Joan
Mitchell painting, which sold at Christie's in May of
2014.
Georgia O'Keeffe, Jimson
Weed, White Flower No. 1,
1932.
The O'Keeffe, which was sold by the artist's
namesake museum in Santa Fe, not only outsoared
its $10 million to $15 million presale estimate, it put the artist squarely in line
with her male contemporaries. As Artnews pointed out, Norman Rockwell set
THE RISE OF ZOMBIE FORMALISM
IS CUBAN ART THE NEXT BIG THING?
C.E.O. SHAKE­UP
BUYER BEWARE
MEMORIES FROM MIAMI
LOOK AHEAD: MUST­SEE MUSEUM
SHOWS IN 2015
Buyer Beware! When it comes to the value of a work of
art, the dealer does not necessarily have
to tell the truth, according to a recent
decision handed down by a New York
court of appeals. After a two-year legal
battle, the court dismissed billionaire
investor Ron Perelman's fraud lawsuit
against his former friend and dealer Larry
Gagosian in December. Perelman
claimed that Gagosian undervalued works
when he was buying them and then
overpriced them when selling, leading to
a series of deceptive transactions
involving $23 million worth of work by
the likes of Cy Twombly and Jeff Koons.
Perelman argued that since he trusted
Gagosian's expertise the alleged doubledealing-playing both the seller and buyer
for his own financial gain-should be
considered a breach of fiduciary duty. But
the court disagreed, saying that valuation
of art is a matter of opinion, not fact, and
it is up to collectors to verify prices on
their own. Gurr Johns provides independent,
objective expertise on value for all art
related transactions. Our appraisers and
art advisors provide fully defendable
opinions of value that allow fiduciaries
and collectors to proceed with confidence
in the art market.
Memories From Miami Alexander Calder mobile at Helly
Nahmad Gallery
Some 73,000 visitors descended on
Miami in December for America's
biggest-and certainly splashiest-annual art
fair, Art Basel Miami Beach. It is always a
celebrity-soaked event, and this year was
no different: Miley Cyrus performed at
an artist record of $46 million in 2013 for his painting "Saying Grace," while
Edward Hopper set his at $40.5 million that same year with his "East Wind
Over Weehawken."
Still, the market for living female artists still has a long way to go, and probably
will remain that way until museums correct the gender gap in their permanent
collections and individual women begin buying art as often as men do. The
record for a living female artist today remains with Cady Noland, whose 1989
print-on-aluminum of Lee Harvey Oswald being shot, titled "Oozewald," sold
at Sotheby's New York for $6.6 million in 2011. Perhaps 2015 will be the year
of change.
THE RISE OF ZOMBIE FORMALISM
"Crapstraction," "Zombie Formalism", whatever you
want to call it, one of the biggest debates in the art
world this year concerned the rise of abstract painting
among young market stars like Jacob Kassay and
Lucien Smith. Here's how the art critic Walter
Robinson, who coined the term Zombie Formalism,
described the genre: it's "'Formalism' because this art
involves a straightforward, reductive, essentialist
method of making a painting... and 'Zombie' because
it brings back to life the discarded aesthetics of
Clement Greenberg, the man who championed
Jackson Pollock, Morris Louis, and Frank Stella's Lucien Smith, Witch Bitch
'black paintings,' among other things."
Would You Like to be Like?,
2012.
It is decorative, bland and made-for-market, say its
more cynical observers, including New York magazine's Jerry Saltz, who wrote
in June that "A large swath of the art being made today is being driven by the
market, and specifically by not very sophisticated speculator-collectors who prey
on their wealthy friends and their friends' wealthy friends, getting them to buy
the same look-​
alike art."
In some ways, the debate seemed to culminate with this fall's opening of the
Museum of Modern Art's show "Forever Now," a survey of "atemporal"
painting by 17 mid-career, mostly American artists. Saltz noticed that "the
show's opening found dealers and art advisers parked in front of artist's work
taking sales orders, as if at an art fair. That feels odd." Meanwhile, Peter
Schjeldahl declared in the New Yorker that painting is not dead, but that the
show "broadcasts the news that substantial newness in painting is obsolete." IS CUBAN ART THE NEXT BIG THING?
Kcho, The Conversation, 2011 at the 11th
Biennial of Havana.
As soon as President Barack Obama announced plans to resume the US's
diplomatic relations with Cuba, art collectors and investors jumped at the
potential of an untapped market. The easing of travel and business relations
"will have a huge impact because Cuba was a limited market in terms of who
got to see the art from the Chelsea and Miami scene," said the New York gallery
owner Alberto Magnan in an interview with Bloomberg in December. Dozens
of collectors called him the moment Obama made his announcement and now,
he said, "I'm basically in Havana for the coming year."
The Miami collector Howard Farber shared the sentiment, telling the Wall
Jeffrey Deitch's party, Baz Luhrmann
curated a booth at Art Basel, Leonardo
DiCaprio partied with models, and Kim
Kardashian did... well, something.
Of course, there were also some very big
sales. Unsurprisingly, blue-chip modern
masters accounted for many of the
highest numbers reported. Among them
were Marianne Boesky's sale of a $1
million Frank Stella painting (to Mr.
DiCaprio, no less), Christophe Van de
Weghe's $5.5 million Jean-Michel
Basquiat and Mnuchin Gallery's $4.5
million Andy Warhol "Mao" print.
Probably the biggest ticket, however, was
Helly Nahmad Gallery's booth-sized
Alexander Calder mobile for $35 million.
The dealer himself was still serving time
for his illegal gambling sentence in New
York, but his collector father, David
Nahmad, handily managed the booth in
his stead. Of course Art Basel itself accounts for
only a tiny slice of the action during
Miami Art Week. Many fairgoers also
paid visits to the city's satellite fairs-Pulse,
Untitled, and NADA on the beach, or
Art Miami on the mainland. The week
also occasioned auctions of works by
Kehinde Wiley and Banksy, as well as the
opening of the Institute of Contemporary
Art, a new museum in the Design District
launched by several trustees formerly of
the Museum of Contemporary Art, North
Miami. LOOK AHEAD: MUST-SEE
MUSEUM SHOWS IN 2015
Whitney Museum of American Art
Reopening May 1, 2015
For the debut show at its new Renzo
Piano-designed home in the Meatpacking
district, the Whitney will give its
permanent collection a well-earned
chronological
reinstallation.
The
expanded eight-floor building, which
houses 50,000 square feet of exhibition
space, will no doubt allow curators Carter
Foster, Dana Miller, Scott Rothkopf and
Donna De Salvo to present the
impressive American collection as never
before.
Museum of Modern Art
"Björk"
March 8-June 7, 2015
Celebrities and musicians have become
popular museum fodder in recent years,
and the Museum of Modern Art is in on
the trend with its exhibition on the
experimental Icelandic singer Björk.
Organized by curator-at-large Klaus
Biesenbach, the show will highlight 20
years of Björk's outlandish costumes,
music videos, audio clips, instruments
and other career ephemera.
New Museum
2015 Triennial: "Surround
Audience"
Street Journal that he expected a "stampede" to the country. "I believe Cuban
art has been a best-kept secret among a few collectors."
In-the-know collectors were already buying Cuban art via an exception in the
US trade embargo that allows for art's classification as a cultural asset. But now
the market is set to widen dramatically as less-seasoned buyers have more of an
opportunity to travel to Cuba, visit studios and shop casually. Dealers, too, are
better poised to discover and sign Cuban artists. At the very least, expect a lifted
mood at the upcoming Havana Biennial, the 30-year-old event that is hosting its
twelfth iteration from May 22 to June 22, 2015.
C.E.O. SHAKE-UP
It came as little surprise when Sotheby's
CEO Bill Ruprecht stepped down from his
post in November. The 14-year auction
house veteran had long been under fire by
the activist investor and hedge-fund
manager Daniel Loeb, who waged a long
proxy battle that ultimately cost the house
$20.1 million and resulted in Loeb's
appointment to the board in May.
February 25-May 24, 2015
Every three years, the New Museum
dedicates its entire building to a show of
emerging work by artists from around the
globe, offering a rare glimpse at the art of
the future, rather than the past. This
year's event is organized by New Museum
curator Lauren Cornell and artist Ryan
Trecartin, who was himself a star
participant in the event's 2009 iteration.
National Gallery London
"Goya: The Portraits"
October 7, 2015-January 10, 2016
William Ruprecht, Sotheby's former
CEO.
But almost no one expected the news, just two weeks
later, that Christie's chief executive Steven P. Murphy
would also resign from his post. After all, the house's
public record under Murphy was far from troubled.
Christie's raked in a record $4.6 billion in sales during
the first half of the year, a 12% increase over the
same period in 2013. And in November, Christie's
New York set an all-time high with a $852.9 million
contemporary art auction-a milestone on the path
toward achieving the first billion-dollar art sale
Steven P. Murphy, Christie's sometime in the near future.
former CEO.
So what happened? According to Christie's, Murphy's departure was always part
of the plan following its expansion into online sales and the Asian market. But
others speculate that the glowing financial figures at Christie's, which, unlike
Sotheby's, is privately held, are not what they seem. "He had to promise [owner
François Pinault] that he'd deliver certain margins, but most of the high-profile
works that featured in the big-ticket postwar auctions were usually loss leaders,
they weren't income generators," a former employee told the Financial Times in
December.
Murphy was replaced this month by Christie's chairman Patricia Barbizet, who
is also CEO of its holding company, Artemis, and will be the first woman to
hold the house's top job. Sotheby's has yet to name a successor to Ruprecht.
For such a psychological painter, it is a
wonder that this will be the first museum
show to focus exclusively on Francisco
de Goya's portraiture. The 50 works on
view range from Goya's days as a court
painter for Charles III in Madrid, through
Ferdinand VII, and into the artist's late
period in France.
Victoria & Albert Museum
"Alexander McQueen: Savage
Beauty"
March 14-July 19, 2015
After its record-breaking run at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume
Institute in 2011, the wildly popular show
of videos and apparel by Alexander
McQueen will return, in expanded form,
to the late designer's native UK. The
museum is already expecting attendance
figures that could well surpass its
blockbuster David Bowie and Hollywood
Costume shows.
Philadelphia Museum of Art
"Represent: 200 Years of African
American Art"
January 10 - April 5, 2015
The museum's major collection of
African-American art, marked largely by
its landmark acquisition of Henry Ossawa
Tanner's painting "The Annunciation" in
1899, is getting much-deserved attention
this year. This show of art from the 1800s
into the present includes work by Tanner,
Horace Pippin, Carrie Mae Weems,
Glenn Ligon and Lorna Simpson, among
others.
Buying and Selling through Gurr Johns
Gurr Johns is uniquely positioned to provide independent advice on buying and selling property from estates, private
collections and institutions. Our team works with each client to develop an effective, customized strategy that maximizes
value. With our global network of private collectors, museums and the art trade, and our extensive experience with auction
consignment, we provide sound advice and consistently act with complete discretion. For further information: please contact Madalyn Darnell at 212-486-7373 or mdarnell@gurrjohns.com.