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Auction Buyers Are Catching on to African-American Art

By Scott Reyburn

Auctioneer Oliver Barker, taking bids at Sotheby’s for Kerry James Marshall’s painting “Past Times.” It was eventually sold for $21.1 million with fees.

Auctioneer Oliver Barker, taking bids at Sotheby’s for Kerry James Marshall’s painting “Past Times.” It was eventually sold for $21.1 million with fees.CreditSotheby's
By Scott Reyburn
May 25, 2018

LONDON — “I don’t need to tell you, sir, how great this is,” said Sotheby’s auctioneer Oliver Barker last Wednesday evening, leaning over his rostrum and trying to coax another eight-figure bid out of the New York dealer David Zwirner for Kerry James Marshall’s 1997 masterwork, “Past Times.”

Moments later, Mr. Barker knocked the lot down to one of three telephone bidders for $21.1 million with fees. A wryly updated “fête champêtre,” showing black suburbanites relaxing in a Chicago park, had just set an auction high for any work by a living African-American artist. The painting was bought by the Grammy Award-winning rapper and music producer, Sean Combs, better known by his former stage names Puff Daddy and P. Diddy.

For many, this sale was by far the most significant moment in the latest biannual series of auctions of Impressionist, modern and contemporary art in New York. But what did it signify?

“That and other results signaled that finally African-American artists are regarded as having the same historical value and price points as their peers,” said Todd Levin, a private dealer and adviser based in New York, who last year curated the exhibition “Power,” devoted to African-American female artists, at Sprüth Magers in Los Angeles. “It also signaled an intensification of activity among African-American collectors,” Mr. Levin added.

As Mr. Levin suggested, there were plenty of other results last week that suggested a surge in demand for African-American art. Sotheby’s Wednesday evening contemporary sale began with five works by leading African-American artists sold to raise money for a new building at the Studio Museum in Harlem.

“Speak, Birdman,” a freshly completed mixed-media abstract by Mark Bradford, was pushed by as many as a dozen bidders to $6.8 million, more than double the presale estimate. Last week, the Broad museum in Los Angeles announced that it had been the purchaser of Mr. Bradford’s 12-foot-wide 2007 abstract, “Helter Skelter I,” which sold in March at Phillips for $12 million — the previous auction high for a living African-American artist. In the same announcement, the Broad said it had also bought a new painting by Mr. Marshall.

Sotheby’s Studio Museum fund-raising lots also included “Bush Babies,” a 2017 work by the admired but rarely available Njideka Akunyili Crosby, whose works usually sell to museums. This set a salesroom high for the artist of $3.4 million. A few lots later, a 1974 full-length portrait “Brenda P” raised a new auction benchmark of $2.2 million for Barkley L. Hendricks, whose art had been foregrounded in last year’s “Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power” show at Tate Modern in London.

The auction market is belatedly reflecting re-evaluations that have been going on for some time in the museum world. Driven by seismic shifts in cultural politics, scholars and curators have challenged the fixity of the West’s artistic canon, rehabilitating neglected talent from a range of communities and cultures.


Kerry James Marshall’s 2017 painting “Untitled (London Bridge)" has just been acquired by the Tate Modern in London.

“This has meant looking beyond figures such as Pollock, Rothko, Warhol and Lichtenstein toward African-American artists working in the same period,” added Mr. Godfrey, who co-organized Tate’s “Soul of a Nation” exhibition. He said that it was part of Tate’s “curatorial vision” to “rethink narratives of art history.”

Mr. Godfrey added that when acquiring works by living artists such as Mr. Bradford and Mr. Marshall, “We learn that Jack Whitten was as important to Bradford as Jacques de la Villeglé, or that Charles White was as significant for Marshall as Velazquez.”

Similar shifts in curatorial emphasis can be seen at numerous museums across the Western world. From Feb. 15 to May 13, the Seattle Art Museum, for example, showed “Figuring History: Robert Colescott, Kerry James Marshall, Mickalene Thomas,” an exhibition of works by three generations of contemporary African-American artists who challenge “a Western painting tradition that underrepresents people of color,” according to the museum’s website. The show coincided with the museum’s current loan display of the 1982 Jean-Michel Basquiat painting, “Untitled,” which sold last May at Sotheby’s for $110.5 million — an auction high for any American artist.

The total of $2 billion for this latest week of evening and day sales — 25 percent up on the equivalent sales last year — seemed to proclaim the rest of the art market was also on a high, particularly after the previous week’s $832.6 million Rockefeller auction at Christie’s.

But these biannual seasons of New York auctions rely on individual trophies to set the tone, and the headlines. This time round, apart from Mr. Marshall’s “Past Times,” there was little that generated any serious salesroom excitement.

On paper, the artwork of the week should have been Amedeo Modigliani’s 1917, “Nu Couché (Sur le Côté Gauche),” which Sotheby’s offered in its Monday evening sale of Impressionist and modern art with an estimate of $150 million, the highest yet placed on any lot at auction. It sold to one bid from its guarantor for $157.2 million.

“The weight of expectation, hype and marketing is distorting the market,” said Hugo Nathan, co-founder of Beaumont Nathan, an art advisory company based in London. “The results feel disappointing, and yet the prices are still huge.”

After the gargantuan $450.3 million given in November for Leonardo’s “Salvator Mundi,” works selling for tens of millions can now seem anticlimactic.

There was an air of routine the following evening at Christie’s auction of Impressionist and modern art when Constantin Brancusi’s 1932 polished bronze portrait of the shipping heiress Nancy Cunard sold for $71 million and Kazimir Malevich’s 1916 “Suprematist Composition” for $85.8 million, auction highs for their respective artists. Both works were guaranteed and estimated at $70 million.

“The financial deals have pushed the numbers to a point where there’s not a lot of room left on the upside,” said Neal Meltzer, an art adviser based in New York.

By contrast, at Phillips contemporary sale on Thursday, the 1984 Basquiat acrylic and oilstick on wood slat painting, “Flexible,” fresh from the artist’s estate, sold to a telephone bidder for $45.3 million, double the estimated price.

Two lots earlier, Pat Steir’s radiant 1992 drip painting, “Elective Affinity Waterfall,” sold for $2.3 million, an auction high for this long-overlooked American painter. The 12-foot-wide canvas — offered, like the Basquiat, without a guarantee — was valued at $600,000 to $800,000. It had been owned by the foundation of the New York philanthropists Manuel D. and Rhoda Mayerson since 1994, when not many people had heard of Ms. Steir — or, indeed, Mr. Marshall.

“If you can get works that are great quality, fresh to the market and attractively estimated without being encumbered by any presale financing, then this is how you create auction magic,” said Melanie Clore, a partner at Clore Wyndham, art advisers based in London.

The principles of the auction market remain the same. But at least the names are being freshened up.

The author of "12 Rules for Life" loves Socialist Realist art

Jordan Peterson, the Controversial Pro-Male Philosopher, Says He Hates Postmodern Art. But He Secretly Loves It!

“Buy a damn piece of art! Find one that speaks to you!”

So sayeth Jordan Peterson, the psychologist-turned-celebrity philosopher-turned Mephistopheles of the Manosphere (Kanye is a fan), in one of his YouTube lectures on art. Last weekend, the New York Times’s peek into the Peterson phenomenon also offered a look at the guru’s own collecting taste: He is, unexpectedly, a connoisseur of Socialist Realism. (If you want a taste of his collection, something called Leonardo Galleries offers a selection online.)

Peterson’s most famous mantra is “clean your room, bucko.” For lost young men feeling that they lack prospects or a place, he offers tough love, blaming a gynocratic, PC society that has taught them not to value their natural drive for mastery over the world around them.

As it turns out, there’s an aesthetic theory nested in here as well: “it’s also not that you clean it up, it’s that you make it beautiful—if you have just made one thing beautiful, you have established a relationship with beauty,” Peterson has explained. His own personal quest to “establish a relationship with beauty” has involved decorating his own home floor-to-ceiling with Soviet-era propaganda.

In matters of art appreciation, Peterson otherwise has essentially normie conservative taste that sounds like old-school Romanticism. He is fond of portentous generalities like “artists articulate the unknown,” etc.

In art, his bête noire is postmodernism, which he declares “equally destructive in all realms, especially when allied with neo-Marxism.” It’s not 100 percent clear what he means, but I assume the target is political installation art and conceptualism, because what he rails against especially is art that is “driven by revenge and resentment” and a “hatred of quality and qualitative distinctions,” thereby abandoning Man’s primordial quest for higher beauty.

As a rule, generalizing about an undefined “postmodernism”—let alone postmodernism “in all realms!”—is lazy. The term covers diverse and mutually contradictory bodies of thought.

But step back for a second: the “postmodern” insight that perceptions of beauty are culturally constructed and therefore benefit from reflection on the appropriate standard of value actually make a lot more intuitive sense than Peterson’s notion of some embattled primal, “transcendent” universal standard. It actually expands, rather than contracts, the “qualitative distinctions” that one is able to make—one can, for instance, recognize that the qualities that make a good hip-hop verse are different from the qualities that make a good lyric poem, while still liking examples of both.

And the funny thing is, Peterson’s own taste in art is the best example of this postmodern understanding of artistic value!

Because why does he decorate his house with Soviet-era propaganda? What pleasure does it give him?

First, he says he loves the craft, which he sees as triumphing over the propaganda. But the pleasure is as intellectual as it is visceral: He also likes it, contradictorily, because it as “a constant reminder,” Bowles relays, “of atrocities and oppression.” (Also, he loves the First World irony of the fact that he purchased these Communist castoffs on capitalist eBay. The first item he collected was not a painting, but a silk flag made to commemorate a Soviet Five Year Plan.)

The pleasures Peterson gets from his art collection are actually not really reducible to their role in “articulating the unknown.” They are, you might say, rooted in a very postmodern aesthetic of “revenge and resentment,” in his case towards the looming dangers of leftwing totalitarianism.

Is his affection for surrounding himself by this accumulation of propaganda so distinct from the satisfaction derived from political installation or conceptual art of any kind? Both as a genre of aesthetic gesture and as a rhetorical intervention, it mirrors the kind of accumulation of damning artifacts as evidence that one might have found—though with a very different target—at the recent “post-colonial” documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel.

The Peterson Collection shows that the guy may be a reactionary in content, but he’s a postmodernist in form.

Black art spurs gold rush as collector stampede drives up prices

Former first lady Michelle Obama and former President Barack Obama pose with artists Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald during the unveiling of their official portraits at the National Portrait Gallery on Monday, Feb. 12, 2018 in Washington, D.C. (Olivier Douliery / Abaca Press)

Amy Sherald once waited tables at the Baltimore Museum of Art.

Today she's a trustee, with collectors and other museums clamoring for her work after unveiling her portrait of Michelle Obama at the National Portrait Gallery earlier this year.

Black artists, long overlooked and undervalued, now occupy one of the hottest corners of the market. Famous buyers have included hedge fund managers Ken Griffin, Steve Cohen and Jim Chanos, major museums, and CNN's Anderson Cooper.

"It's such a watershed moment," said Lisa Melandri, executive director of Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, which will host Sherald's first solo museum exhibition next month. "It realigns the canon of art history."

Unlike trends that tend to fade after a year or two, black art has been sustained by unparalleled museum support. The gold rush is playing out from Sotheby's, where billionaire Yusaku Maezawa paid $110.5 million for a Jean-Michel Basquiat canvas last May, to sold-out exhibitions and art fairs worldwide.

U.S. institutions are realizing their collections have largely overlooked the black figure.

"It's a bit of a mad scramble," said Todd Levin, a New York art adviser. "They're all aware that they have been behind the curve in supporting, collecting and exhibiting work by African-American artists and they're all making tremendous expenditures to make sure there's more equal representation."

Perez Art Museum Miami established a $1.1 million fund, with backing from billionaire Jorge Perez and the Knight Foundation, that will allow it to acquire black art in perpetuity, no matter who's in charge, said museum director Franklin Sirmans.

The Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired more than 430 works by black artists since 2010, according to Ann Temkin, the chief curator of painting and sculpture.

"They're part of a very rich and textured history that we weren't really committed to exploring," Temkin said. Now museums have to "literally pay for the fact that we weren't as actively engaged in this a decade ago."

Los Angeles-born artist Mark Bradford is photographed in front of "The Next Hot Line." This piece is part of his show "Scorched Earth," installed at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles in 2015. Black artists, long overlooked and undervalued, now occupy one of the hottest corners of the market. 

 (Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times)

This week, MoMA got a big break. Chris Ofili's "The Holy Virgin Mary" -- an elephant dung-adorned canvas depicting a black Madonna -- entered the museum's permanent collection, thanks to a gift from Cohen, a MoMA trustee. The painting -- made famous in 1999 when then-New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani tried to have it banished from an exhibit -- fetched $4.6 million in 2015, an auction record for the British artist.

In December, MoMA also received "Tomorrow Is Another Day" -- a 2016 painting by Los Angeles artist Mark Bradford -- as a gift from Griffin, the founder of Citadel. "Helter Skelter I," a Bradford painting inspired by serial killer Charles Manson, was acquired earlier this year by the Broad museum for $12 million, an auction record for the artist. The seller was retired tennis pro John McEnroe.

In the past decade, Swann Auction Galleries in New York, which sold $5.3 million of African-American art in 2017, launched hundreds of black artists at auction and established records for major figures, including Abstract Expressionist painter Norman Lewis.

"It's a backlog of talent," said Miami collector Mera Rubell. "You're looking at four generations of black artists."

Take Sam Gilliam, 84, a Color Field painter in Washington. A decade ago, his auction prices were in the "embarrassingly low" $10,000 range, said Nigel Freeman, Swann's director of African-American fine art. Since 2014, auction sales increased 662 percent, totaling $2.5 million last year, according to Artprice.com.

Sotheby's sold a Gilliam in September for a record $684,500. In January, Robert Mnuchin's Upper East Side gallery, better known for selling Warhols and de Koonings, hosted a solo show for the artist.

David Zwirner, one of the world's leading galleries, recently started working with Kerry James Marshall of Chicago whose prices hit a record $5 million at auction in November, following an acclaimed retrospective that visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Portraits by Barkley Hendricks, who died last year, also are in demand, with auction revenue up 2,400 percent since 2014.

A piece by Sam Gilliam was recently acquired by Williams College Museum of Art. 

(Katya Kazakina / Bloomberg)

"Collectors are very interested in what artists of color have to say now," said Jack Shainman, whose gallery represents Hendricks. "For many years it didn't matter."

Among those drawn to these narratives is CNN's Cooper, whose eclectic collection of mostly figurative art ranges from Old Master canvases to hand-painted, wooden barber signs from East Africa.

In recent years Cooper added works by several black artists to his collection, although he said he doesn't view black art as a collecting category. He owns an abstract painting by Bradford, which incorporates pieces of paper from his mother's hair salon and Nathaniel Mary Quinn's collage portraits of the residents of Chicago housing projects where he grew up.

"The work seems a genuine reflection of their past , present and view on society," Cooper said of the artists he admires.

The Studio Museum of Harlem, led by Thelma Golden, has been the launching pad for many black artists. Rubell, the Miami art collector, and her husband Don helped drive greater acceptance in the U.S. In 2008, their foundation featured three generations of black artists in "30 Americans." The exhibition crisscrossed the country, visiting 11 museums, with five more scheduled through early 2020. Most of the featured artists became international sensations.

Emerging black artists starred last month at the Armory Show, New York's biggest contemporary art fair, where Nicodim Gallery sold out of paintings and sculptures by South Africa's Simphiwe Ndzube on the first day, with prices ranging from $20,000 to $40,000.

"The world has fallen in love with black artists," said Rubell, who bought a multi-media installation by Ndzube. "They have a powerful story to tell."

Meet the First Ever Black Woman Entrepreneur to Design a BMW Car -- And She's 82-Year Old!

In 1991, Esther Mahlangu, an 82-year old South African Ndebele artist and entrepreneur, became the first non-Western and first Black woman to design artwork on a BMW car. 26 years later, the German car giant is her partnering with her again for a new project.

  

Esther's unique and colorful artworks surely caught BMW's attention. In 1991, she's teamed up with BMW to create an art car as other artists like Andy Warhol, David Hockney, and Frank Stella had done before. But hers is different. She created the first "African Art Car" from a BMW 525i painted with classic motifs of the Ndebele tribe.

In 2016, BMW once again selected her to create new car designs for a BMW Individual 7 Series. The car was on display at the Frieze Art Fair which took place in London. Mahlangu's 1991 BMW Artcar was also exhibited at the British Museum as a part of  "South Africa: the art of a nation."

Her artworks strongly depict the traditions of Ndebele tribe where she came from. Women from the Ndebele tribe usually decorate the walls with striking patterns and designs as a means of communication within the community.

"The patterns I have used on the BMW parts marry tradition and to the essence of BMW. When BMW sent me the panels to paint I could see the design in my head and I just wanted to get started ... My heart was full of joy when BMW asked me to paint for them again," Esther said about her second collaboration with BMW.

Aside from BMW, she also got to work with other prestigious brands such as British Airways where her artworks have been featured on their plane tails. She also collaborated with John Legend for Beldevere, a beverage company, on their RED campaign which aims to fight against AIDS. Swedish sneaker brand Eytys also teamed up with her to create a special pair of sneakers embroidered with her artwork.

Even more, in April 2018, Mahlungu received an honorary doctorate by the University of Johannesburg for her contribution to the world of arts.

Despite being considered an icon in South Africa and an internationally-proclaimed artist, Mahlangu says she stays grounded.

"My art has taken me all over the world and I have seen many places," she said in a statement. "I have painted many walls and objects and my work is in many museums, but I am still Esther Mahlangu from Mpumalanga in South Africa..."

For more details about Esther Mahlangu and her artwork, visit www.esthermahlanguart.com