In a turnabout from recent seasons, Christie’s started off New York’s fall auction series Monday with a bust—not a bang. The auction house’s $92.5 million sale of the estate of Pablo Picasso’s dealer Jan Krugier had been marketed as an art bazaar brimming with an eclectic array of art by everyone from Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres to Marcel Duchamp to Edward Hopper—plus African wooden masks. But the broad mixture backfired as piece after piece failed to sell.
No one wanted the most expensive artwork in the sale, Picasso’s 3-foot-tall steel sculpture from 1964 that served as the model for a soaring public-art piece in Chicago, “Head (Maquette for the Public Sculpture of the Chicago Civic Center.)” It was priced to sell for at least $25 million but garnered no bids. Dealers said the sculpture was considered a quirky one-off in the artist’s oeuvre, but the house priced as though it was a masterpiece.
Wassily Kandinsky’s yolk-yellow “Autumn Landscape” from 1911 had previously belonged to architect Mies van der Rohe and was also expected to soar above $20 million but stalled at $14 million and failed to find any takers. Alberto Giacometti’s “Woman of Venice I,” was priced to sell for at least $9 million but bombed as well, The Wall street Journal informs.
