Why did a painting promoted as "one of the most haunting and evocative
images in the history of European art" fail to sell at auction? Did
Christie's decision not to place a reasonable estimate on the painting
scare away bidders? It is an old auction house practice that when a particularly
important painting is entered in a sale, the words "Estimate Upon Request"
are printed in the catalogue, but it is a practice that can backfire
and frequently does. Whilst E.U.R. gives the painting an instantly higher
profile lifting it into the upper echelons of world masterpieces that we
all covet, it can also plainly put people off. What it really means
is "in our opinion, this painting can only be bought by fabulously wealthy
serious collectors or museums and we don't want to bothered by just anyone".
In this case, to be a player meant having around £6 -£7
Million to spare.
Such a figure was expected and would have been transmitted to "serious"
enquirers before the sale. However those three words "Estimate Upon Request"
can deter not only big league private collectors but dealers as well. It
somehow implies that the price will be so high, that it really is
not worth entering the fray. Even experienced bidders sometimes lose out
in a E.U.R. sale by waiting too long for the bidding to heat up. If something
goes wrong, it can all be over in a second. If nobody is bidding
then other buyers are going to think "Oh dear, there really is something
wrong with this picture." when that may not at all be the case. A huge
misunderstanding takes place, silence ensues and the painting is "brought
in" as they say, not having even reached the reserve price.
When a painting is published with an estimate in a catalogue, at least
the bidder knows that the reserve price is probably 10% lower than
the lower estimate and if he or she sees the bidding is not going well,
this allows an outsider to enter and perhaps get the picture just before
the hammer falls for the reserve price. The Munch painting was never given
this chance.
No doubt, the whole auction room yesterday at Christie's was fraught
with nervous tension and suspense as the crowd waited for the bidding
to take flight for as the auctionhouse had quite rightly stated Munch's
Madonna
was an instantly recognizable masterpiece. But the hype had obviously
failed to convince the market and the painting will now languish in
auction limbo if a private after-sale contract is not negotiated
at a price lower than the reserve. The auction house has lost out, the
owner has lost out, perhaps a potentially keen buyer has lost out and most
of all, the painting has lost out. Its integrity as a work of art and its
previously unflawed reputation is now irreparably damaged.
read Christie's PRESS RELEASE published on their website before
the sale...
Sale 6168, 7 October, 2:00 p.m.CHRISTIE's London, King Street
Lot 113, £7 Million Expected in October Sale in London
The highlight of this auction—and a major lot of the fall international
season—is Edvard Munch’s Madonna, one of the most haunting and evocative
images in the history of European art. Executed in Berlin between 1894
and 1895, Madonna is a fin-de-siècle masterpiece that stands
at the crossroads of nineteenth- and twentieth-century art. Instantly recognisable,
the image is a fundamental part of Munch’s celebrated “Frieze of Life”
series, which includes the artist’s most famous work, The Scream.
Like a holy apparition, Munch’s Madonna is depicted amid rippling
waves of colour reminiscent of the blood red and swirling clouds of The
Scream. Wrapped in cosmic mists, Madonna’s face radiates beauty and
mystic ecstasy. Pale and skull-like, her darkened sleepy eyes suggest death
while her blood-red lips, warmed from some embrace, breath forth life.
With jet-black hair straggling down in Medusa-like threads over her shoulders
and breasts, she is crowned Madonna with a rich, blood-red halo. Munch’s
Madonna is an embodiment of the mystic nature of life and an evocation
of the miracle of existence. The artist’s aim was to represent Woman from
the point of view of her lover, at the moment of conception. Munch described
the moment as being when “life and death join hands,” when “Woman” as a
creature, standing at the gateway between life and death, reaches her apotheosis.
In encapsulating the themes of love, death, fear, anxiety and desire
in one highly evocative image, Munch brought together all the themes with
which he was preoccupied in the early 1890s. He saw these themes as being
central to human existence as well as to the secret emotions of his own
life which he had kept hidden within him since his earliest traumatic initiation
to love, jealousy and rejection in the 1880s. Wanting to paint “more than
a mere photograph of nature”, and to create “an art that gives something
to humanity”, it was these fundamentally human themes that Munch wished
to use as the basis of his art.
The themes formed the thread that linked his greatest works in what
was to be his magnum opus and life-long project, “The Frieze of Life.”
The Madonna, like The Scream and Anxiety was one of the first works to
be executed for the Frieze.
Although there is a debate over who Munch chose as his model for the
image of the Madonna, it is generally assumed to be the daughter of a Norwegian
doctor friend of his, Dagny Juell whom Munch was obsessed with and who
became his muse. An independent modern woman and an advocator of free love
who reputedly drank absinthe by the litre without getting drunk, Dagny
had captured the hearts of most of Munch’s friends at Zum Schwarzen Ferkel,
the bar that served as the headquarters of Berlin’s most avant-guarde literary
circle.
Of the five versions of Madonna that Munch painted, three are in major
collections in the Munch Museum, Oslo; The National Gallery in Oslo and
the Kunsthalle in Hamburg. The present painting is the most ambitious and
experimental of the five. Thinning his paints with turpentine to the point
where they drip and bleed onto the canvas, Munch has left the texture of
the
surface of the canvas, raw in places. It is as much the psychological exploration
of imagery and the symbolism of Munch’s work as the revolutionary use of
new media that identifies Munch as one of the first “modern” artists.
The present Madonna, is thought to have been first exhibited in 1894,
in Stockholm. It was also included in the most important exhibition of
the inter-war years, the great Berlin retrospective of 1927. It has been
included in several major exhibitions of the artist’s work since. Originally
in the collection of Jørgen Breder Stang (1874-1950), the son of
an Oslo timber merchant, the work has never been seen at auction before.
The auction includes museum-quality pictures by such artists as Ernst
Ludwig Kirchner, Emil Nolde, Alexej Jawlensky and their contemporaries.
In addition, a masterpiece by German Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich
will make an unprecedented appearance. Zwei Männer in Betrachtung
des Mondes, estimated between £800,000 and £1,200,000, has
remained hidden in a private collection for almost a century. It has been
publicly exhibited only once, in 1990, since it was painted as a gift for
the artist’s physician, Dr. Fritz von Rosenberg, in 1830. The work has
remained in the collection of Rosenberg’s descendants ever since.
Christie's annual sale of German and Austrian art is one of the leading
events of the international auction calendar, and is regarded as the leading
forum for the sale of German and Austrian pictures.
Footnote : the sale of 280 lots reached £13,860,356 in total
