It is becoming ever more important for the photo experts at the top auction houses to persuade important collectors to consign top-flight collections. Last year, in a major embarrassment for Sotheby's and Christie's, the upstart Phillips won the right to sell the Seagram's collection and subsequently walked off with the season's top honors. This season, Sotheby's struck gold with two major single-owner sales of its own.
Sotheby's strikes gold while Christie's sales are off.
On April 27, Sotheby's held a sale entitled "Important Photographs from a Private Collection." Of significance is the fact that it held the sale on that night in April, perhaps trying to emulate the powerful Impressionist and Modern paintings department. (Their top sales are ticket-only evening events comparable to glitzy Hollywood movie openings.) When the auction houses try to woo collectors away from each other, the promise of such an over-the-top production is a powerful lure.
Evidently, the ploy worked. It lured a standing-room only crowd that bid very aggressively--so aggressively, in fact, that nine out of every 10 pieces sold over-estimate.
Each and every one of the 43 pieces sold, and the auction brought in $3.9 million, 60 percent more than the estimate. The top lot at the sale was the disquieting Diane Arbus masterpiece, "Identical Twins (Cathleen and Colleen), Roselle, N.J."
"Disquieting" might be an understatement; according to Sotheby's, it served "as inspiration for the recurring motif of twin girls that appears throughout Stanley Kubrick's film, 'The Shining.'" Originally expected to bring $250,000 to $350,000, it ultimately sold to an anonymous private collector for $478,400, a new auction record for Arbus.
Another record was set when Walker Evans' "Negro Barbershop Interior, Atlanta," sold to the Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York for $198,400. This price is somewhat baffling, as this very work had sold just two years earlier at Sotheby's for only $95,600. This represents a 100 percent increase in two years--quite an enviable return on investment. The last of the three records set that night was for Robert Frank, when an image of his 1956 photograph "Chicago" realized $131,200; more than four times its high estimate of $30,000.
The second single-owner sale held at Sotheby's this season carried the following unwieldy title, "The Gordon L. Bennett Collection of Carleton Watkins 'New Series' Photographs of Yosemite." The set is remarkable in that it comprises 40 125-year-old mammoth photographs in "superb condition."
In fact, finding any Watkins pieces at all is difficult, according to the head of Sotheby's photographs department, Denise Bethel. "He lost his life's work twice," says Bethel. Once, when he was forced to turn over his entire stock of negatives to I. W. Taber, a rival photographic publisher, and then when the fires following the San Francisco earthquake destroyed his 'New Series' views."
The 40 photographs were purchased by Gordon Bennett in a rare book store in San Francisco in 1967. He found them hidden on the store's bottom shelves. One might hope that the shop's owner, who had priced them at $25 each, or less, is not around to read that the set brought $2 million, far exceeding its high estimate of $1,406,000. The top lot was "Aggasiz Rock and the Yosemite Falls, From Union Point," which sold to the Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco for a record price of $310,400.
As for the main mixed-owners auction, the results were somewhat less extraordinary.
The sale totaled $2,795,200, (below the high estimate of $2.9 million), and approximately 20 percent of the 179 works on offer went unsold. Frankly, this may be a more accurate gauge of the general state of the photo market. It seems that when exceptional collections appear, so do exceptional buyers, which explains the phenomenal success of the two Sotheby sales. For those in the real world trying to sell typical items, the reception is not quite as enthusiastic.
Four works in the sale broke the $100,000 mark, and, interestingly, three of them were taken by the lovers Tina Modotti and Edward Weston. The one Modotti, "Bandolier, Corn, and Guitar," which sold for $120,000, is a politically charged piece intended to evoke thoughts of the Mexican revolution. The other two $100,000-plus pieces, still lifes by Weston, are far less radical: "Pepper (3P)" (which also brought $120,000) and "Shells" (which brought the highest price at the sale, $232,000).
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