Marquee Auction News, Parthenon Blues, and Gold-Toilet Thieves Face the Slammer

Some big November news stories, and a lush new art book on state-capitol buildings

T oday is an “In the News” story, and since it’s the start of the Christmas shopping season, I’ll focus first on buying and selling.

The big-enchilada auctions at Christie’s and Sotheby’s unfolded last week, called Marquee Week for the glamour of the art, mostly modern and contemporary, though will all these seven-, eight-, and nine-figure dollar amounts fit on a marquee? The art market isn’t a single market but hundreds of niche markets, so it’s hard to conclude much. Bidding wasn’t thin, but thinner than in boom years. Even the ultra-rich were cautious. Boutique art from distinguished collections did well. And who thought that auction-watching would ever be hot reality TV?

Sotheby’s sold the top 31 works collected by the art patron Emily Fisher Landau for $424 million with premiums, just ahead of the total low estimate. It’s a rare white-glove sale, a sale where everything sold. Landau died earlier this year at 102. Through the 1950s and ’60s, her husband, the New York real estate developer Martin Fisher, bought her sets of expensive jewelry for birthdays and holidays and, one year, tossed her a 39-carat blue-white diamond solitaire.

In 1969, thieves disguised as air-conditioner repairmen raided their Upper East Side home, leaving Mrs. Fisher without a bauble. Fuggitabout diamonds, rubies, and pearls, she decided. Works by Rothko, Picasso, and Warhol would be her new best friends. With her insurance check, she bought paintings. Then she bought more and more. And she displayed her art in a private museum in Queens, open to the public.

Her big-ticket Picasso, Femme à la montre, from 1932, sold on the phone for $121 million, a meager million over the low estimate, not including fees. Ed Ruscha’s Securing the Last Letter (Boss), from 1969, went for $39 million, a bit above the low estimate. Who’d buy a picture emblazoned with the word “Boss” except a Master of the Universe?

The auction set a record for Agnes Martin for her 1961 Grey Stone II, a big, Minimalist thing that’s inward, silent, and bewitching. It went for $18.7 million, fees included. I like Martin’s work. Her trademark is densely stacked, hand-painted, or drawn grids, usually monochromatic. It’s very soothing. She grew up in Saskatchewan and said she was inspired by sweeping fields of wheat. She lived a big part of her life in the Southwest, so I see her as a wide-open-spaces artist.

Landau was a longtime trustee of the Whitney, to which she was generous in giving art and money. I gave her a tour through the Clark twice when I was a curator and liked and admired her. She’ll be considered, along with Peggy Guggenheim, Gertrude Stein, and Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, one of the most adventurous women collectors of her time.

Christie’s evening sale on November 9 was much more expansive than the Landau event, with far more lots and many collections, rather than just one. Claude Monet’s Le bassin aux nymphéas, a seven-foot-wide Giverny pond scene painted in 1917–19, sold for $74 million, including fees. Monet is both a 19th-century and a 20th-century artist. Living until 1926, he painted absorbing, prismatic water and flower scenes, many immersive and more and more abstract over the years.

Christie’s Monet, like many of his late pictures, is an all-over scene with no horizon line and no terra firma. Giverny wasn’t far from First World War battlefields, and Monet often heard shellfire from his garden. Le bassin is a tranquil moment existing in a realm of chaos.

Francis Bacon’s Figure in Movement, from 1976, offers no tranquility but plenty of chaos. I think Bacon’s overrated, but it’s a picture that’s turbulent and poignant. It went for $52.2 million with fees. I didn’t like Richard Diebenkorn’s Recollections of a Visit to Leningrad, 1965, from that year, though it went for $46.4 million after lots of phone bidding. Yes, it’s an important painting since his Ocean Park series follows it. Yes, it shows Diebenkorn’s immense admiration of Matisse, whose work in Russian collections he’d just seen. Together, these make Recollections a transitional picture. Still, it set a record for the artist. Arshile Gorky’s Charred Beloved I, from 1946, went for $23.4 million. It’s fabulous.

Neither Christie’s nor Sotheby’s has firm numbers on viewership, but I’m told that high-price-tag auctions such as Christie’s big evening sale and Sotheby’s Landau sale are hot reality-TV items. I watched the Christie’s sale with close friends last week on their big screen. I’ve been to lots of live auctions over the years and enjoy them but, alas, we don’t have a TV in Ye Olde Vermont.

A couple of years ago, I wrote about Sotheby’s jump into high-energy, high-production-values televised auctions. Most bidders do the deed by phone now, or their agents bid for them. Bidders are international and also shy these days, and it’s a challenge to learn who bought what. Anonymity is now at a premium. So we don’t have in-the-flesh bidding wars among billionaires.

What’s the attraction? The art looks great, and with every lot there’s a new moment of drama. The auction-house people, arrayed at a bank of phones, are notably better-looking and better-dressed than in my day. At Sotheby’s, Oliver Barker, the head auctioneer, is British and balletic. And the expenditure of tens of millions in seconds is riveting itself. Action moves fast, and these shows are a brisk walk through art history. Beats the heinous Rachel Maddow and Selling Sunset, which I watched once and thought I’d been transported to outer space.

News on the Elgin Marbles front. I’ve written about how badly the British political establishment wants to return the Elgin Marbles, the Parthenon sculptures that Britain owns and displays at the British Museum in London. The gods and goddesses, Lapiths and centaurs, processing maidens and galloping phylarchs, and assorted body parts have lived at the BM since 1832. There’s no proof the British don’t own them. Parliament bought them from Lord Elgin in 1816. He got them from the Ottoman Turks, who ruled Athens, by decree, in 1810. Everyone involved in their acquisition is long dead. The Greeks didn’t claim they were looted until 1983.

Why return what is, after the Crown Jewels, Westminster Abbey, and afternoon tea at the Ritz, London’s best attraction? Because the British Empire behaved imperiously. Because George Osborne wants them to go. He chairs the British Museum’s board. Though the board reports to the government, and his Tory masters say “they stay,” his single-minded persistence means “they’re going.”

Run from his post as chancellor of the exchequer after Brexit, the master of the austerity drive of the early 2010s, and a toff supreme, he wants to be rehabilitated before the chattering classes in Notting Hill, Chelsea, and Belgravia. The Greeks are victims, sort of, and the British are oppressors, or they were once, maybe, or so some pearl-clutchers on Eaton Square say. Now more than ever, the fix seems set in stone.

Osborne is a paragon of double-down politics. Runaway pols, or skulk-away pols, drop a new policy the instant someone noisy opposes it. With today’s Tories, if that someone has green hair or multiple genders or is Trot down to his, her, their, or zazuza’s knickers, it’s likely they’ll cower and skedaddle.

Double-downers not only don’t scramble, they don’t surrender. They push the policy with more fervor, and more urgency, and more cheek. Osborne double-downed at a high-end donor dinner, in the Duveen Gallery, before the Elgin Marbles themselves. Most are headless, but those with heads were struck dumb. Savile Row, I hear, has a big order in the works for bespoke crates.

People were surprised to hear that Osborne won’t wait until the BM appoints a new director. Why would he? A new director might oppose the plan. And Greek-antiquities departments are in mortified disarray after a leading BM antiquities curator of some 30 years is thought to have stolen 2,000 little baubles, most Greek and Roman, and sold them on eBay. And these weren’t catalogued, so no one really knows what went missing except the thief. Who are they to wail, especially with no full-fledged director to support them?

The public, their common sense and national pride dulled by years of empire-bashing, seem not to care. Watch Osborne send the sculptures back before the Tories are put out with the rubbish next year. What will the Brits get for it? Unlike Let’s Make a Deal, behind every curtain will be a great big ZONK.

And then there’s a gold toilet in the news.

I doubt we’ll see such a thing as a gold toilet behind one of these curtains. In 2019, thieves swiped a fully functioning, 18-karat gold toilet designed by the Italian conceptual artist Maurizio Cattelan and displayed at the wonderful Blenheim Palace as part of an exhibition. Last week, four men were arrested for the theft.

Titled America, it was installed in the docent restroom and intended by the artist to be “the 1% for the 99%,” since the visiting public could use it, to the distress of the docents, mostly elderly ladies. Its value is, according to the New York Times, $5.9 million. Gold is $1,981.71 per ounce, but that’s 24-karat gold. I tend to put “not” after every “is” in the Times, but this time it might be right. Knowing Cattelan’s work, I think the value is in the metal. It’s a three-dimensional work of art with a one-dimensional meaning.

Impressive, sprawling Blenheim Palace is the home of the Dukes of Marlborough. It’s got a fine art collection. Winston Churchill, an old duke’s nephew, was born there. He’s buried in nearby Bladon. I saw the gold toilet when it was displayed at the Guggenheim in New York City a few years ago. I can confirm that it’s functional. In taking it — at 5 a.m. — the thieves in Oxfordshire weren’t tidy. They left the docent loo flooded.

Blenheim is glad the crooks are caught and thanks the local police. A trial is scheduled far into 2024. I hear the court system’s clogged.

A couple of years ago, I wrote about an exhibition of very beautiful photographs of interiors and exteriors of American state capitol buildings. The project by Robert Lisak and David Ottenstein, two gifted Connecticut photographers, was under way. The show, with photographs of a selection of capitols, was at the Stanley-Whitman House, a historic house museum in Farmington, near Hartford, Conn.

Now, with the artists having photographed all 50 capitols, their book, Capitol America, is out. It’s sumptuous and educational. It’s not a political or architectural history. They’re artists first. Their project fascinates me because I worked in Connecticut’s glorious, gaudy capitol for years but also understand that we’re a nation of 50 states, states with rights and powers established by the Constitution yet very much trampled. Each state’s very different, and each building reflects the tastes of its time. Each capitol building is aspirational in its own way. The book’s great and an evocative cross-country tour.