Recently, auction houses seem to have be winning on all fronts. A new record was set for an artwork sold at auction ten days ago in New York when Les femmes d’Alger, a 1955 painting by Picasso, went for a whopping 179.36 million dollars to the former Qatari Prime Minister Hamad bin Jassem. In less than five days, Christie’s and Sotheby’s earned nearly 2.2 billion dollars, another record.
A few weeks ago, when I was presenting a beautiful Siskind print to a Swiss collector for his Abstract Expressionist collection, I heard myself say: “Photography isn’t art.” And yet, remarkably for photo fans worldwide, “Looking Forward to the Past,” the historic sale featuring 35 masterpieces of Impressionist, modern and contemporary art at Rockefeller Plaza on Monday, May 11th, had more to offer than paintings, sculptures and drawings. A Diane Arbus photograph, “Child with a toy hand grenade in Central Park, NYC, 1962” and another by Richard Prince, “Untitled (Girlfriend), 1993” could be seen among the Schiele, Monet, Giacometti and Rothko.
Has the wall that separated photography from the other arts started to give way?
While it’s true that some rare photographs can now be seen in major contemporary art auctions, those up for sale at traditional photography sales in London at Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Phillips last weeks wanted for quality. The Phillips House, undoubtedly superior to its competitors, could take pride in having set two new records on May 21st (for Herb Ritts and Pieter Hugo). What it exhibited at Berkeley Square paled in comparison to what visitors could admire at the Somerset House as part of Photo London.
Jacques-Henri Lartigue, Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Edward Steichen, Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, Bill Brandt, Man Ray, Horst P. Horst, Eliott Erwitt, Irving Penn, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Diane Arbus, Robert Mapplethorpe, Josef Koudelka, Berenice Abbott, Saul Leiter, Herb Ritts, Richard Avedon, Steven Klein, Peter Beard, Sugimoto, Araki, Chuck Close, Seydou Keita, Martin Parr, Sebastião Salgado, Shadi Ghadirian—there’s a lineup to make any auction house dream, especially since the prints were mostly vintage, unlike those on display at the Mayfair.
On the highly contemporary side, we should praise the initiative led by Michael Benson and Fariba Farshad, the duo behind the cultural production agency Candlestar, which revived Photo London after eight years. Not only were the directors of the fair able to seduce the highly respected Howard Greenberg and Edwynn Houk galleries, but younger players like Roman Road and Scheublein + Bak as well.
This all goes to show that if there’s an art in which auction houses are poorer than galleries, it’s photography!
