Bye-Bye “Back”: David Norman, Sotheby’s Impressionist/Modern co-chair, extols the virtues of Matisse’s “Back I” during last week’s press preview for the evening sales.
I was poised to compose a post deploring the four-sale, two-city (New York and London) dispersal through Sotheby’s of Matisse‘s bronze reliefs, “The Backs” (scheduled to commence tonight), when the auction house issued this terse (but very welcome) announcement:
Yesterday afternoon, the Burnett Foundation withdrew Henri Matisse’s
masterpieces, “Les Nus de Dos” (“The Backs”) from auction at Sotheby’s, in order to conclude a private sale
transaction brokered by Sotheby’s on the entire group of four sculptures. Both the buyer and the purchase price
will remain confidential.
I assume this means that the rescuer of this set was not a museum, unless the buyer will “remain confidential” only until after the transaction is concluded. Sotheby’s had discreetly offered the entire set to a few select prospects before setting the planned auctions in motion.
[UPDATE: David Norman of Sotheby’s confirmed to me after the conclusion of the Impressionist/Modern evening sale that the purchaser of “The Backs” was a private collector.]
According to Carol Vogel‘s previous NY Times report:
Dealers approached by the auction house reported that they [Sotheby’s] were hoping for around $200 million for all four.
And now, this just in from Vogel:
People familiar with the deal say all four have been sold together for around $120 million.
The set of “Backs” consigned to Sotheby’s had been on loan to the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, from 2001-11. A Kimbell spokesperson today told me that her museum is not the purchaser.
The awarding of this consignment to Sotheby’s (rather than to rival Christie’s) was a foregone conclusion: The president of the Burnett Foundation is Mrs. John Marion, whose husband is Sotheby’s honorary chairman, its retired ace auctioneer, and a trustee of the foundation. The foundation will use the proceeds to “to support the community of Fort Worth,” according to Sotheby’s press release. It had acquired the reliefs from California mega-collector Norton Simon in 1982.
What I found problematic about this sale, aside from the lamentable sundering of a revelatory, sequential series that should always remain intact, was the involvement of MoMA’s retired chief curator of painting and sculpture, John Elderfield, in helping to promote this affront to Matisse scholarship—a field in which his expertise is highly respected. The bravura coda to Elderfield’s Matisse: Radical Invention show at MoMA was the array of the complete set of “Backs” casts that are owned by MoMA (and have now been returned to their customary perch on a wall of the museum’s sculpture garden).
In its catalogue entry for “Back I,” Sotheby’s thanked Elderfield “for agreeing to the publication of this excerpt from his forthcoming monograph on Matisse’s ‘Backs,'” which provided potential purchasers with “a hitherto untold account [emphasis added] of how Matisse brought his first manifestaton of ‘The Backs’ into being.”
Allowing his not yet published monograph to be used as an accessory to this planned (happily averted) dispersal was a courtesy that, on principle, Elderfield should have refused.
We can only hope that a similarly happy fate may yet befall the four Clyfford Still works entered in Sotheby’s Contemporary sale next week. They are set to be sold separately, after a half-hearted attempt to find a single buyer, preferably a museum, for works that the late artist had stipulated were never to be sold. The group had been selected by Stlll Museum director Dean Sobel to represent the sweep of the artist’s career, making them attractive to a museum. But Tobias Meyer, Sotheby’s contemporary art head, told me at last week’s press preview that he had argued strongly (apparently successfully) in favor of the auction option.
“Our job is to make a lot of money for them,” he said, asserting that public auction was the best way to maximize the haul. Disposals that were originally intended to raise $25 million for the Still Museum’s endowment are now aiming for a presale estimate of $51-71.5 million. Given yesterday’s abyssmal auction results at Christie’s, as well as the difficulty in gauging market demand for an artist whose works have rarely (by his own choice) been up for sale, perhaps $25 million (the amount guaranteed by the auction house) is a more realistic figure.