“I really had no idea how it was going to go,” said the gallerist Xavier Hufkens of this year’s Art Basel Miami Beach fair, echoing the uncertainty of many at this last big art event of the year. Global political tensions have dented art-market confidence for weeks, while the economic downturn has weighed on it throughout what Hufkens describes as a “very strange year”. As such, he felt “relieved” at Wednesday’s opening of the fair — the largest of its kind in the Americas, with 277 exhibitors — describing business as “really good”. Sales included a 2023 painting by Tracey Emin for £1.2mn and an edition of a new bronze and wood sculpture by Danh Võ, which went early on to an American collector for €240,000.
The crowd was “more subdued” this year, noted art adviser Morgan Long, but this, she added, is not such a bad thing: “People used to be in town for parties, now they are here to buy art.” Organised into more distinct zones this year, there was praise from many for the revised floor plan. “I would never normally talk about a new layout, but the fair feels airier and much easier to navigate,” Hufkens said.
The highest reported sale price by far was $20mn for Philip Guston’s “Painter at Night” (1979) through Hauser & Wirth, though most other transactions were made between $50,000 and $500,000. These included Thornton Dial’s “Birds See What the Tiger Can’t” (1991, David Lewis gallery, $275,000) and 2022 canvases by Lonnie Holley for up to $130,000 (Edel Assanti). The much-discussed first Black Painting work by Frank Stella, “Delta” (1958), offered by his family and with an asking price of $45mn at Yares Art, remained unsold after the first day.
Female Old Masters are out in force this winter. In New York, Robilant+Voena has opened a show dedicated to “pioneering women from the Renaissance to the 20th century”, including a work recently attributed to Artemisia Gentileschi, the posterchild for this field in recent years. Her work here, “Penitent Magdalene” (c1625-30), was bought for $129,150 in 2021 from a Florida auction house, catalogued as “After Artemisia Gentileschi”. Subsequent research has confirmed the painting as an autograph Gentileschi and it is offered here for more than $5mn, a level that the artist can now command. Other artists from this period among the 21 on show are Fede Galizia and the lesser-known Orsola Maddalena Caccia, who — like Gentileschi — were trained by their artist fathers.
Virginia Brilliant, the gallery’s director of Old Masters and the show’s curator, says that “all I have heard from museums and collectors since 2019 is that they are really, really keen [to acquire] under-represented artists. The challenge is that good-quality material, backed by scholarship, is hard to find.” A former museum curator, Brilliant is conscious that many institutions “have an annual acquisition budget of about $250,000” and confirms that some of the works, including allegories by Angelica Kauffman (1741-1807), fit that bill.
Female artists held their own at Sotheby’s Old Masters auction in London on Wednesday, where a 1615 still life by the Antwerp painter Clara Peeters sold for £550,000 (£698,500 with fees, est £500,000-£700,000). Next month, the auction house will offer 12 works by French artist Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun (1755-1842), from the collection of the art historian Joseph Baillio (total estimate $2.4mn-$3.5mn).
The estate of American artist James Rosenquist, who died in 2017, will offer about 50 of his prints at Phillips in New York on February 15. The works have a combined estimate of $265,000-$410,000 but “are not being sold as a moneymaking situation”, says Cary Leibowitz, worldwide co-head of Phillips’s editions department. Rather, he says, the estate “felt it was an opportunity to capture a new generation of collectors”. There are, he says, “25-year-olds who don’t know Rosenquist’s name, while he is one of the most important artists of the 1960s”, alongside the likes of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein.
As with many of his contemporaries, printmaking was core to Rosenquist’s practice and he continued with the medium beyond the 1960s, later working with Ken Tyler of Tyler Graphics to make challenging, often enormous works. The Phillips prints encompass earlier Pop works, with everyday images such as tinned spaghetti strands and the GE logo, and his later, more surreal series, including Welcome to the Water Planet (from 1987). The latter, Leibowitz says, should resonate with a younger audience: “Rosenquist was thinking about the relationship of man and nature, and the precariousness of our planet.”
“We want to de-dust auctions and make them sexy again!” is the manifesto of the Filthy Fox Auction Club, which runs its second sale of work by art students and recent graduates this weekend. It was co-founded by multidisciplinary artist Paula Parole, recently graduated herself, and design manager/fashion model Alexandra Hochgürtel after the pair noticed that “the auction process is underrated by students, who think it is just for the most prestigious collectors to buy secondary-market art,” Parole says. “We want to use it as an exciting tool to support our community.”
Working with an initial £1,000 from a University of the Arts London award, the pair now charges a 20 per cent buyer’s premium to cover costs. These include the hire of a gallery in east London to show the work, host some “surprise performances” and conduct the live sale, also streamed on Instagram.
Last year’s auction of 32 works went down well, with the majority sold, so this year the offering has expanded to 44 works by 14 artists, chosen by Hochgürtel and Parole from art schools including Central Saint Martins, Goldsmiths, Slade and the Royal College of Art. Parole’s work is in the mix this year (from £200), while bidding will start at the lowest possible level for a work by Goldsmiths student Michelle Lee Johnson. The website explains: “To experiment with putting the decision of value on to the audience/viewer, Michelle has decided to start the auction with the minimum bid of £0.”
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