Five De Staël paintings in February…

[04/02/2014]

 

Sotheby’s and Christie’s London sales of Post-War & Contemporary Art will be heeld on 12 and 13 February respectively. Among the big names, the catalogues contain four paintings by Nicolas DE STAËL, three of which are late works from his most popular (and most expensive) period 1953-1955.

Nicolas de Staël painted more than a thousand works in 15 years. Today, those he created after 1953 are the most sought-after at auction, and the works he did before the 1950s only recently (in 2012) crossed the EUR 1 million threshold: a 1947 Composition fetched €1.3 million ($1.6 m) on 29 May 2012 at Sotheby’s in Paris. Today, the artist has 35 million-plus auction results to his name (in dollars) generated mainly in France (15 in Paris and 1 in Versailles) and to a lesser extent in London and New York.

His best result for 2013 was notably recorded on 3 June in Paris (which accounts for more than 40% of his global auction turnover) when Nu Debout a vertical composition (156 cm high and 89cm wide) from 1953 fetched €4m ($5.2m), his third-best auction result. Created at a pivotal time for the artist, both artistically (he was returning to figuration after his Footballers series) and career-wise (his work was beginning to receive international exposure), De Staël painted Nu Debout while preparing his first solo exhibition in the United States (Knoedler Gallery, New York). Although he was well-received at the time (and an abstract painting from 1947 was subsequently acquired by the MoMA), his market is not very dynamic in the United States nowadays, in spite of the artist’s immense international notoriety. All his works pass through either London or Paris with London selling the largest number of masterpieces (generating half his turnover from just 26% of the lots) while France remains, a priori, his market’s supply nerve centre. However, the result of €4m last June bolstered Paris’s position in this respect: indeed, the French capital holds the artist’s all-time auction record since another nude (reclining this time) from 1953 /54 (Nu couché, (Nu) fetched EUR 6.01 million ($8.17m) in 2011. Much cheaper than his British or American counterparts, De Staël still has a relatively discreet auction footprint despite the inflation of his prices over the last decade (+ nearly 300%). There are however numerous European buyers of his work including French and English of course, but also German and Swiss collectors.

The two canvases offered at Sotheby’s on 12 February 2014 are a 1949 Composition estimated GBP 350,000 – 450 000 and Paysage à Agrigente (60 x 81 cm), a painting that fetched $1.3m (± $1.5m including fees) on 10 February 2005 at Sotheby’s in London, and now carrying an estimate of $1.6m – $2.5m.
The following day, Christie’s will be offering Selinunte, a masterpiece from 1953 (54 x 72.5 cm) with excellent provenance (acquired from the Denise Cade Gallery in 1985 and never sold subsequently) with an estimate of GBP 1m – 1.5m (USD 1.6 – 2.5m), and a smaller composition from the same year entitled (Composition-paysage (Le Castelet), (33.2 x 24 cm) which it expects to sell for over USD 500,000 (estimated GBP 300,000 – 400,000). The work has been part of an American collection since 1964.