Bumper New York sales feature $50mn collection

Christie’s will offer a $50mn collection that belonged to the late Alan and Dorothy Press, a Chicago-based couple who started buying art together soon after they were married in 1970. Nine works, guaranteed to sell, will be in an increasingly stuffed evening sales season in New York this May, with further pieces in the lower-priced day sale. The Press offering is topped by Ed Ruscha’s “Burning Standard” (1968), bought by the couple in 1991 and estimated at $20mn. Ruscha made six paintings of the Standard petrol stations, including two that feature an imagined fire, which “totally disrupts the pristine angularity of the picture”, says Ana Maria Celis, head of Christie’s postwar and contemporary art.

Alan Press, a commodities trader who died in 2021, and his wife Dorothy, who died at the beginning of this year, collected relatively few artists but those in depth. As well as two other works by Ruscha, the auction will have three paintings by Philip Guston — including his “Chair” (1976, est $12mn-$18mn) — and pieces by Man Ray, Henri Matisse and Ken Price. The artists don’t all obviously connect stylistically, though Celis says that the works are “all quite directly beautiful”.

Christie’s May sales already offer art valued at hundreds of millions of dollars, including 16 works from the estate of the media magnate SI Newhouse, seven more works from the Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and a two-part auction of about 220 works owned by the late Boston collector Gerald Fineberg.

Gagosian gallery now represents photographer Nan Goldin globally, working alongside her long-term dealership, Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco.

Goldin has become known for her activism as well as her art after she, in her words, “narrowly escaped” the opioid crisis. Her public protests against members of the Sackler family, whose company Purdue Pharma produced the addictive OxyContin drug, are the backbone of the acclaimed film All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (2022), directed by Laura Poitras. Goldin also documented the impact of the Aids epidemic from the late 1980s.

Earlier in her career, Goldin worked with Matthew Marks gallery in New York and most recently was represented globally by Marian Goodman Gallery (since 2018). Goodman is now in her nineties and her well-served artists are gradually finding new homes.

The Andy Warhol Foundation has raised more than $3mn from works sold through a collaboration with eBay that began in December 2021. Proceeds from monthly auctions held on the charitable arm of the ecommerce platform go towards the foundation’s granting programme. This gives about $15mn per year to visual arts organisations, says Michael Dayton Hermann, its director of licensing, marketing and sales. So far, the initiative has sold more than 750 original Warhol works and other printed materials, all from the artist’s estate, he says.

To mark the $3mn milestone, the foundation this week opened its largest sale to date, of 50 mostly photography-based lots featuring the creatives in Warhol’s circle. There are original Polaroids of Sylvester Stallone (1979, starting price $8,000) and Robert Mapplethorpe (c1972, $6,000) plus a black-and-white photo of the photographer Annie Leibovitz with a camera (1976, $7,200) and Debbie Harry (1980, $8,000). A 1977 self-portrait Polaroid also features ($16,000).

“I realised that we had a strong inventory of works of lower value and needed a global platform that supported this,” Hermann says of the unusual art-world decision to sell on eBay. The Warhol collector Paul Marechal, who has bought ink drawings through the initiative, says: “Half of Warhol’s work was intended for everybody, he would have loved it.” Plus, he notes, eBay does not charge a buyer’s commission. The Andy Warhol: Social Network auction runs until April 3.

Cromwell Place, a handsome commercial gallery hub in west London, has appointed the curator Helen Nisbet as its first chief executive and artistic director. Nisbet joins in August from Art Night, a contemporary art festival that she has organised since 2018.

The appointment of the curator, who is also a Turner Prize judge this year, indicates a change of direction for the hub, set up in 2020 to rent out 15 spaces to commercial galleries as well as operating an art-world membership scheme. Nisbet describes it as a “rethink” and says she would like to steer the focus towards artists — “often overlooked in the business of doing everything else”. Her relaunch will take about a year to materialise and include the formation of a new board, she says. Elizabeth Dellert, who joined as membership and business development director in January 2022, stays in that role.

Museum shows can entice prime works to market and so it is with Wayne Thiebaud. Alongside his solo exhibition in Basel’s Fondation Beyeler, Sotheby’s has secured the artist’s “Candy Counter” (1969) — not in the Swiss show — to offer for between $10mn-$15mn in May. At this level, the work would make the second highest auction price for Thiebaud, whose “Four Pinball Machines” (1962) sold in 2020 for $19.1mn, far ahead of his previous record of $8.5mn. Having been in the Thiebaud family collection, “Candy Counter” was bought within the past five years by its current sellers, Sotheby’s says.

Thiebaud started his career as an animator, including for Walt Disney, and was known for his colourful paintings of food, particularly sweets and desserts. He rejected being labelled as a Pop artist, saying that its associated irony was not in keeping with his work. He died in 2021, aged 101.

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