The first of Christie’s two-part auction of real estate investor Gerald Fineberg‘s collection featured big names and generated $153 million in sales, but most lots garnered hammer prices below or near their low estimates, with several works going unsold.
The evening sale, which took place after the first day of the Frieze New York, featured 65 lots of modern, postwar, and contemporary works spanning 100 years by blue-chip artists like Picasso, Alexander Calder, Man Ray, Christopher Wool, and Gerhard Richter. The Fineberg two-parter will also finish off the auction house’s May sales in New York, which earlier this month saw works from the collections of Paul Allen, S.I. Newhouse, and Alan and Dorothy Press hit the block.
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Fineberg’s holdings were described by Christie’s as “unique and special” for the breadth of styles, movements, and artists spanning a century of art. Phone bids came in from Taiwan, Germany, and Amsterdam, but the final results resembled the tepid sales at the Newhouse auction last week. The evening did set five new auction records for artists such as Barkley L. Hendricks, Alma Thomas, and Alina Szapocznikow.
The evening’s top lot was Christopher Wool’s Untitled (1963), which also had the largest estimate going into the night at $15 million to $20 million. But, the work, which features the sentence “FUCK EM IF THEY CANT TAKE A JOKE” in colorful stenciling, hammered for only $8.4 million, or $10.07 million with fees.
That discrepancy between estimates and hammer prices also occurred for works by Lee Krasner, Gerhard Richter, Jeff Koons, and Willem de Kooning. Richter’s 1967 painting Badende, which was exhibited at the 1972 Venice Biennale, carried an estimate of $15 million to $20 million, but sold for just $9.61 million.
The Koons, a 1987 stainless steel sculpture titled Kiepenkerl (Humpty Dumpty), went for just under $2 million (estimate $3 million–$5 million), while a 1983 de Kooning sold for $5.3 million (estimate $8 million–$12 million) and a 1977 sold for $3.7 million (estimate $6 million–$8 million). The evening’s two Krasners sold for $4.3 million (estimate $6 million–$8 million) and $3.4 million (estimate $4 million–$6 million).
Similarly, Picasso’s 1969 Buste d’homme lauré realized a final auction price of $8.46 million. This is not only below the low end of Christie’s estimate of $9 million to $12 million, but not much more than the $7.8 million Fineberg paid for painting at Sotheby’s Hong Kong in September 2018, which when adjusted for inflation is around $9.3 million.
Works by James Rosenquist, Norman Lewis, Louis Bourgeois, Francis Picabia, and Mark Grotjahn were marked as passed and did not find buyers.
The evening, however, did get off to a momentous start. The first lot, a blue porcelain sculpture titled 109 (Face Jug Series) by Simone Leigh, sold for $630,000, above its estimate of $300,000 to $500,000. It was quickly followed by a Beauford Delaney oil painting from 1960, Composition Blue, which sold for $781,200 (against a $300,000–$500,000 estimate).
Ruth Asawa’s Untitled (S.410, Hanging Seven-Lobed, Three-Part Continuous Form (Stripes)), from ca. 1955, and Alice Neel’s The De Vegh Twins (1975) both prompted rapid bids from paddles in the showroom and clients on the phone with specialists. Asawa’s galvanized steel and brass wire sculpture sold for $2.47 million, in between its estimate of $2 million to $3 million, and Neel’s painting sold for nearly $2.6 million, well above its estimate of $1.2 million to $1.8 million.
Concerning the evening’s records, Thomas’s exuberant abstraction A Fantastic Sunset (1970) sold for $3.9 million on an estimate of $2 million to $3 million. Szapocznikow’s resin-and-granite sculpture Portret Wielokrotny (Dwukrotny) [Multiple Portrait (Double)], from 1967, also garnered rapid bidding, selling for $907,200 and smashing its estimate of $150,000 to $200,000.
But it was the six minutes of bidding for Hendrick’s 1971 portrait of fellow artist Stanley Whitney that stole the evening, as it was expected to break his current record. The last time a Hendricks work came to auction was in December 2020 where it sold for $4 million. The Whitney portrait’s final price of $6.1 million (estimate $5 million–$7 million) solidly beat that record by more than $2 million.
In a post-sale statement, Sara Friedlander, Christie’s deputy chairman of post-war and contemporary art put a positive spin on the sale, saying that “Jerry Fineberg would have reveled in this evening, which showed how far ahead of the curve he was in his collecting evidenced by the multitude of world record prices set by artists, many of whom have never appeared in an evening sale at Christie’s.”