Welcome back to Wall Power. I’m Marion Maneker.
It’s a fine Sunday evening in wintertime. Come sit by the fire and let’s talk about the art world.
Larry Gagosian built his global empire of galleries by launching each new space with a show featuring Cy Twombly. The pattern began in 1989 when Twombly opened Gagosian’s 980 Madison Avenue flagship gallery with an exhibition of his legendary Bolsena paintings. The partnership
was mutually beneficial: Gagosian burnished his prestige with shows by one of the most revered artists of his time; meanwhile, Twombly got a constant goad to push himself late in his career—a time when many artists are content to rest on their fame. Tonight, I’ll explain why Gagosian’s bowing out of 980 Madison after a 36-year run. Also, Julie Davich delves into the New York City Ballet’s Art Series.
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- A $53 million gearhead toy: A Mercedes-Benz once driven to victory by Juan Manuel Fangio in the 1955 Buenos Aires Grand Prix—and which, with its streamlined chassis installed, later achieved the fastest lap at Monza with Sir Stirling Moss stomping the pedals—sold yesterday for $53 million in a special single-lot auction held at the Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart. One of only four versions of the Mercedes W 196 R with a streamlined chassis,
this car was originally donated by the automaker to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Museum, which is now selling it to benefit its collection and restoration efforts. Three years ago, Mercedes sold a related car, the gull-wing 1955 300 SLR “Uhlenhaut Coupé,” for $143 million.
That automobile had been owned by the company since it was built, and was one of only two made in the coupé form. Mercedes’s strong support for the sale seems to be part of a broader strategy to enhance the brand’s
image by encouraging a serious presence on the collector car auction market—an approach that watch market observers will find familiar.
- The price of a Condo: Last week in New York, artist George Condo—he of the bucktooth rabbit faces and cubist refractions—opened a two-gallery show at Sprüth Magers (uptown) and Hauser & Wirth (downtown). The nearly two dozen giant pastel works on paper, which are retailing for between $600,000 and $1.5
million, according to Artnet, are all new—made between late last year and as recently as last month.
While the themes and images are classic Condo, the 20 large-scale works were all made with pastels, which allowed the artist to produce them more quickly. On Friday, as I toured the shows—both of which are quite good, especially the Hauser show in SoHo—I was
reminded of the thesis that art advisor Jacob King published last year, about how the art market’s slowdown was caused, in part, by the decision among many important galleries to raise primary market prices to the level of secondary market trading.
Condo, of course, has many fans and a strong secondary market. Nearly $40 million worth of his art was sold at auction
last year, same as the two years prior, according to data from ARTDAI. That’s down from peaks of $77 million in 2021 and nearly $62 million in 2018. The decline might be attributed to the rising price level for his paintings—the average price at auction has remained consistently high since 2018—which may make owners want to hold, and give buyers pause before pulling the trigger. In that sense, these
less-expensive pastels help bridge the perception gap in value for Condo’s work, with buyers getting the visual impact of a multimillion-dollar Condo painting for a discount because the work is made on paper. Does that resolve the sticker shock on his paintings? The market will tell us eventually. Right now, at least, I’m hearing one potential buyer thought the move was a little too aggressive.
Several weeks ago, I was speaking to a collector who’d been somewhat surprised to receive a
call from one of Condo’s galleries, with whom the collector had never done business. The gallery was offering some of the new work, but at prices the collector thought were, well, higher than they should have been. As anyone in the art market will tell you, the value of art is exactly what someone will pay for it. So when I left the second Condo show, I texted the collector, curious to hear whether he bought the work. “Pass,” he replied. “Too expensive.”
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Julie Brener Davich
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NYC Ballet in Technicolor
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(Photo: Julie Davich/Puck)
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Compared with the rest of the year, January is a relatively quiet
month for events around New York—with the exception of the New York City Ballet’s annual Art Series. For the past 13 years, the company has commissioned a mid-career artist to create an installation for the David H. Koch Theater’s promenade, and held three special performances with discounted tickets. The program started as an audience development tool, and has by all accounts been hugely successful: About half of those who buy tickets to the Art Series are brand new to NYCB.
The first
artist to participate in the series, in 2013, was Faile—followed by JR, Dustin Yellin, Marcel Dzama, and Santtu Mustonen. In 2018, Geronimo filled the promenade with mirrored balloons; the following year, Shantell Martin created one of her signature black-and-white line paintings live onstage. In 2023, Lonneke Gordijn and Ralph
Nauta’s Studio DRIFT installed their kinetic Shylights along the ceiling. While some pieces remain on view around the theater building, most of the works have been returned to the artists.
This year, the company commissioned a photographer for the first time: Elizaveta Porodina, whose theatrical, Technicolor images of NYCB dancers in motion are hanging from the promenade ceiling on oversize sheer scrims, where they’ll
stay for the duration of the company’s winter season, ending March 2. Each attendee at one of the Art Series performances receives a commemorative postcard with one of Porodina’s images.
I caught one of the Art Series performances on Friday night. The first ballet of the evening, Christopher Wheeldon’s From You Within Me, premiered last year, and features costumes and
backdrops by Alaska-born artist Kylie Manning, who is represented by Pace. (I spotted her in the audience with the gallery’s president, Samanthe Rubell.) The third, Mystic Familiar, was a world premiere by Justin Peck, featuring a backlit abstract geometric backdrop by Arizona-born artist Eamon Ore-Giron, featured in this year’s Whitney Biennial and represented by James Cohan Gallery.
The final Art Series performance is this Saturday, February 8. There are still a few tickets left. If you go, stay for the afterparty on the promenade.
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Larry Gagosian, who knows more than anyone about selling overpriced
trophy assets to very rich men, is being displaced at his 980 Madison flagship gallery by Bloomberg Philanthropies, which bought the property for $560 million. It’s a fitting end to one era—and a fascinating start to another.
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It’s hard to know what Larry Gagosian must be
feeling as he closes out his 36-year run upstairs at 980 Madison Avenue. The building, which was designed specifically for the Parke-Bernet auction house, was described by The New York Times in 2006 as “the Grand Central Terminal of the art world, where dealers, collectors, curators, appraisers, and just plain voyeurs took in the great auction-dramas of the mid 20th century.” In 1987, then already owned by Sotheby’s, Parke-Bernet moved to its current location on York Avenue. Meanwhile,
Gagosian and other galleries started to move in at 980 Madison—and for the next three and a half decades, the building remained a veritable hub for the art market.
Indeed, there’s something fitting about the way the building’s reign as a nexus of the art world is coming to an end. Gagosian, who may know more than anyone about selling overpriced trophy assets to very rich men, is being displaced by Bloomberg Philanthropies, which bought the property for $560 million
from real estate investor Aby Rosen, who’d originally hoped to develop a tower over it. (Rosen, who bought the place for $118 million in 2004, got almost five times his investment.) But Gagosian isn’t giving up his footprint on Madison altogether—he’s just changing it. While vacating the upper floors, he’ll maintain his gallery space on the ground floor by occupying additional street-facing retail space.
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It’s hard to think of Gagosian himself as sentimental or
nostalgic, and he’s unlikely to be that worked up about the move. Galleries like Nahmad Contemporary, White Cube, Robilant+Voena, Venus Over Manhattan, Edward Tyler Nahem, Dickinson, and others have all either had offices there recently, or are still there. I’ve spoken to at least two of the other gallery tenants—much smaller players—who are sanguine about moving on, and are unlikely to move into a similar retail space. Such is the changing nature of art dealing, and the loss of decent
real estate options on the Upper East Side.
When Gagosian opened the galley in 1989, he was able to show Cy Twombly’s Bolsena paintings, made 20 years earlier and provoked by the Apollo missions to the moon. After that, as Gagosian pioneered the concept of a single art gallery with globe-girdling outposts, he would continue to call on Twombly to inaugurate his new gallery spaces.
“For 10 years,” the artist Jenny Saville, also a star of Gagosian’s stable, said in her lecture at the Menil Collection a year ago, “there was a challenge of sorts going on between Twombly and Larry Gagosian.” As Saville described it, this game of one-upsmanship—What would you create for this space, Cy? What about this one?—produced an extraordinary and unexpected body of work by the aging artist. “I’m not sure Twombly would have created this run of paintings
without those spaces and that encouragement,” she said. “And that he agreed to participate with this level of energy, at this moment in his life, made Gagosian the gallery it is today.”
Now, as a fitting coda for the gallery—a way to look back and underline what was most important—Gagosian has chosen to mount a show simply titled Cy Twombly, featuring four key bodies of work mostly borrowed from private collections and Twombly’s family, some of which have
never been seen before.
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The show spans two floors and three different Gagosian gallery spaces at 980 Madison.
There’s a gallery devoted to works on paper from the series Five Day Wait at Jiayuguan, created in 1980 for the Venice Biennale, cataloging the artist’s trip the previous year through Russia, Afghanistan, and Central Asia. This presentation reunites the works for a public exhibition for the first time in 40 years.
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There’s also a group of mysterious green-toned paintings, three on
square-quatrefoil canvases, that are neither immediately recognizable as Twombly’s gestural work nor obviously related to his works inspired by classicism. Don’t bother to look at reproductions of these cascading flows of color; the images don’t reproduce well at all. In person, you’ll be startled to find, they are simultaneously soothing and discomfiting, like a pleasant sound that also begins almost immediately to grate.
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Cy Twombly, Untitled (L to R: 1970, 1968, 1970) Photo: Maris Hutchinson,
Courtesy of Gagosian Gallery
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The real draw of the show is mounted in the square, windowless,
sixth-floor gallery that Twombly, according to Gagosian, called the “water lily room.” It offers a selection of Twombly’s famed and beloved-by-most “blackboard” paintings. But this is not simply a show of trophy works: You won’t see any of the spectacular looping blackboard monoliths that are the apex of the series. (Though you can run downtown to see a very nice, smaller version at the Hill Art Foundation in Chelsea.) Instead, these are far more interesting examples of how Twombly’s mark-making
produces something that is both totally foreign and frustratingly familiar. Gagosian won’t allow you to take pictures of the artwork with a camera, but phones are allowed, or at least tolerated.
As I tried to take pictures with my iPhone, the camera kept trying to read several of the illegibly scrawled blackboard paintings as text. Over and over, it flashed with a yellow symbol indicating it had transcribed the image into
text. Yet every time I pressed the icon, curious to see what it could possibly have captured, the phone came up blank. It was a tidy summation of the experience: recognizable, but utterly alien.
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Late last week, I noticed an Artnet
story about Retna, the graffiti artist, losing his L.A. studio to a landlord who’d asked for increasing amounts of money to clear two rent payments the artist had missed about a year ago. The story revealed that the artist, whose given name is Marquis Lewis, was filing a suit to stop the contents of his
studio from being sold on January 30. It caught my eye mostly because the sale was being conducted by the Urban Art team at Heritage Auctions, the Dallas powerhouse. I recently wrote about a lawsuit between Peter Beard’s studio and Heritage over the sale of personal items and ephemera that the studio objected to being sold as artworks. In the Artnet article,
Armen Vartian, Heritage’s attorney, was quoted in reference to the Retna sale saying that “everything Heritage has done is on good faith and in accordance with the applicable California laws.”
With that in mind, I was even more surprised to see that Heritage Urban Art’s Instagram account on Friday morning had posted a celebratory picture of the team, flexing that the Retna sale had
made more than $2 million. By Saturday morning, the post had been taken down.
Also on Friday, Vulture posted its own version of the same story Artnet wrote on Tuesday. In it, Rachel Corbett explained Lewis’s version of events. He’d missed two payments and believes he’d repaid the back rent,
only to have the sister of his original landlord raise her claim and refuse to accept payment. To make matters worse, Lewis seems to have been in some trouble with the law—locked up in the hoosegow, it seems—during the proceedings that ended up putting his works in the hands of his former landlord. It had been the landlord conducting an abandoned property sale through Heritage.
In Vulture’s story, Vartian said he was satisfied that
nothing unlawful was going on with the sale. “Heritage wouldn’t be involved in anything if it was unlawful,” he added. Fair enough. But then why take down the Instagram post?
On that note, I won’t say “goodbye,” but so long, until Tuesday…
M
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