Flash News: Sculpture – Records – Museum crisis – New York – Giacometti in China

Every fortnight, Artprice provides a short round up of art market news: New records for sculpture – A museum crisis in New York… – First Giacometti exhibition in China

New records for sculpture
This month has seen some welcome movement at the top end of the sculpture market. First, Maurizio Cattelan’s Him fetched more than $17 million on Sunday 8 May at Christie’s in New York, setting a new personal record for the 55 year-old Italian artist. Him is one of his most subversive works, representing Adolf Hitler, the size of a child of seven, kneeling in prayer. Cattelan’s previous auction record was $7.9 million for an installation with a model of the artist’s head poking through a hole in the floor (Untitled, Sotheby’s, New York, 12 May 2010). Since Maurizio Cattelan announced the end of his artistic career in 2012, his price index had fallen by -96%. However, this new record has significantly restored market confidence. The following day, a much more classical work generated a superb result at Sotheby’s: Auguste Rodin’s marble Jehovah Spring fetched approximately $20.4 million against a pre-sale estimate of $8 to 12 million and a previous auction record of $18.9 million (for his bronze sculpture Eve, grand modèle-version sans rocher at Christie’s New York on 6 May 2008).
Now just $3 million separates the two eras… Auguste RODIN and his extraordinary marble kiss… and Maurizio CATTELAN with his provocative embodiment of evil. Contemporary art is now as expensive as great historical works. Today, not many sculptures fetch such high prices unless they are by Alberto Giacometti, Paul Gauguin, Edgar Degas, Miro and Picasso for the Moderns, and Louise Bourgeois and Jeff Koons for the Contemporaries.

A museum crisis in New York…
New York may well be the capital of the global art market…. but it seems the city urgently needs new strategies to ensure that it remains so. A few weeks after American auction firm Sotheby’s announced voluntary redundancy plans, some of New York’s major museums appear to be in serious financial difficulty. Colossal operating costs are not being adequately matched by income despite substantial strong private support and despite their permission to sell works from their permanent collections (unlike France where museums are bound by the principle of inalienable public collections). Shortly after an announcement by the Metropolitan Museum of Art (MET) in mid-April admitting an operating deficit of $10 million, a restructuring plan and the elimination of dozens of jobs, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) announced a voluntary redundancy plan due to severe economic difficulties, despite a recent donation of $100 million by producer David Geffen in April.

First Giacometti exhibition in China
While Alberto GIACOMETTI is undoubtedly a superstar of Modern art, generating the world’s fifth highest auction turnover total for an individual artist in 2015, he is little known in Asia. It may seem surprising, but the current exhibition of 250 Giacometti works in Shanghai is his first ever exhibition in China. The Chinese public, which didn’t know Picasso 10 years ago, had never seen the tall solitary walkers that have become almost de rigueur in most major Western museums. The current retrospective at Shanghai’s Yuz Museum (until 31 July 2016) allows the Chinese public to discover all of Giacometti’s creative periods in a majestic exhibition space of 3,000 m2.
The next step could be the emergence of Giacometti on the Chinese art market, from which he is currently totally absent.