Buoyant mood and million-dollar sales at Art Basel Miami Beach

“This market is ridiculously resilient in the face of other realities,” said the US-based gallerist Sean Kelly at Tuesday’s VIP opening of Art Basel Miami Beach. Describing himself as “already very happy” with the pace of sales before and during the fair, these included work by his gallery’s new signing, the Missouri-born Anthony Akinbola, whose “White Bronco” (2022), a large-scale wall work made from the durag hair cloths often worn by people in Africa and the diaspora, sold immediately for $35,000.

Seven-figure sales were reported on opening day, including “We Mourn Our Loss #2” (1997) by Kerry James Marshall, which sold for $2.8mn (Jack Shainman Gallery) and a 1998 Agnes Martin for $7mn (Pace Gallery). Hauser & Wirth reported a sales total of more than $18mn by midday while visitors included the tennis legend Venus Williams and the musician Jon Bon Jovi.

“I thought the optimism could be tempered because of the economy and the recent happenings in the crypto space, but people are still supporting the market,” said the London-based art adviser Janna Lang. “This is the week that American and Latin American collectors turn up for.” Her highlights included a solo booth by the Nigeria-born Ruth Ige at Stevenson gallery (priced from $14,000), where sales were quickly made. Gallery co-owner Joost Bosland said: “We haven’t seen everyone we’d normally see yet, but we are only halfway through day one.”

Fair organisers had to negotiate one unusual distraction this year — the US’s World Cup football match against Iran, which ended in a win and qualification to the next round for the home team. “People were watching the football on their phones. for sure,” Lang said. Art Basel Miami Beach runs until Sunday.

Christie’s will field its biggest Old Masters offering for a decade as part of its 2023 Classic Week in New York, back in late January after experimenting with a springtime slot since 2016. The works, spanning more than 400 years and with a combined estimate of about $80mn, are dominated by a pair of 1805 portraits by Francisco Goya of a Rioja-region mother and her eligible daughter (complete with a market-friendly lapdog). The paintings will be auctioned together for $15mn-$20mn on January 27 and — as they have already been backed by a third party — will make a public record price for the Spanish artist, which currently stands at $7.8mn.

Andrew Fletcher, Christie’s global head of Old Masters, notes the artist’s quick brushstrokes within a more traditional format, which “perfectly describe Robert Hughes’s maxim that Goya was the last Old Master and the first modern painter”, he says. He believes the portraits were likely made in one sitting, anticipating Impressionism.

A separate auction on January 25 comprises 86 works from the financier JE Safra, no stranger to the salerooms. His latest offerings are topped by JMW Turner’s watercolour “The Splügen Pass” (1842), valued between $1.5mn and $2mn. Estimates for Safra’s works start around $20,000 and the collection will have no reserve, meaning that they will sell at any price. In practice, the auctioneer begins bidding at 50 per cent of a work’s low estimate and, if there are no bids, will halve the price again. This is rare though, as bargain-hunters normally pile in from the start. “‘No reserve’ encourages competition and every extra bidder gets you another percentage on the price,” Fletcher says.

The London collector and curator Lisa Reuben reveals that she was the buyer of Francis Bacon’s charged painting of his friend and rival, “Three Studies for Portrait of Lucian Freud” (1964), for $28mn ($30mn with fees, est $30mn-$40mn) on November 16.

As the work’s only bidder at Sotheby’s New York, Reuben — who bought over the phone — notes that despite the huge totals from the latest seasons of sales, demand was stretched after the mammoth Paul Allen auction at Christie’s the week before, which also included another Bacon triptych. Estimates were punchy this season, a deterrent to lively speculative bids. In contrast, when Reuben’s Bacon painting was previously auctioned in 2011, it had a relatively inviting £7mn-£9mn estimate, which helped take it to £23mn (with fees, then equivalent to $37mn).

Reuben confirms that the painting has been added to the collection she is building for her family, including her businessman father Simon Reuben and his brother David. She describes Bacon’s first triptych of Freud as “part of a fascinating love story”. Last year, she bought Freud’s 2002 painting of another fellow artist, David Hockney, for a fee-inclusive £14.9mn (est £8mn-£12mn, Sotheby’s).

London’s Stephen Friedman gallery is expanding to Cork Street — a move just one block away but that replaces his three spaces in Old Burlington Street, where Friedman started out in 1995. The new building, at 5-6 Cork Street, should open in autumn 2023, in time for London’s Frieze fairs, after a redesign by David Kohn Architects. Among the promised features are a new mezzanine floor, a library and a courtyard garden, which will have sculptures — and a café.

“There will be a calm space, in the middle of London’s art world, to share ideas and rebuild a community,” Friedman says. He says he was inspired by the “palpable energy” of London Gallery Weekend, a galvanising annual event that started during a lockdown (its third edition is June 2-4 2023). Friedman characterises the move into approximately 12,000 sq ft as indicative of the gallery’s growth.

His new space is on the more classic west side of Cork Street — the previous incumbent was Saatchi Yates, which opened there in 2020 but now moves to Bury Street in St James’s, a site also under construction. Friedman’s landlord, the Pollen Estate, wants to restore Cork Street to its historical art-world glory. Frieze has a gallery hub at number 9, which opened in 2021, while Goodman Gallery was the first on the revamped road when it opened its London space on the east side in 2019.

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