A major work by Picasso and one by Alberto Giacometti both failed
to sell at the Sotheby's auction last night, leading Bloomberg to announce that the art market has "flunked a stress test."
The $61.4 million total was about a quarter of the tally of a year ago and well below the auction house's low estimate of $81.5 million. Picasso's robin-egg blue portrait of the artist's daughter and a bronze cat by Swiss sculptor Giacometti had each been estimated to fetch up to $24 million.
"They took a big hit in terms of credibility by not selling those two pieces," said Andrea Crane of Gagosian Gallery. "Those estimates were way too aggressive."
A packed crowd couldn't mask the mood. Yawns and raised eyebrows littered the suited and Louboutin-shod spectators, as Sotheby's had its smallest tally for the category since the $33.1 million two months after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
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The Picasso was offered by William Achenbaum, a New York real-estate developer and chairman of Gansevoort Hotel Group, according to a dealer with knowledge of the collector’s holdings, who declined to be named. Achenbaum was an investor with Bernard Madoff’s $65 billion Ponzi scheme, according to a filing in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court.
Other Impressionist works from the collection of Henry and Louisine Havemeyer (which have displayed at the Met) did much better than the modern works that were up for auction. Claude Monet's 1872 "French landscape with a sailboat on the Seine river" was sold to dealer David Nahmad for $3.5 million. A 1934 Piet Mondrien, "Composition in Black and White, with Double Lines," sold for $9.3 million, which was $4.3 million over the estimate.
