MASTERPIECE Auction House’s first auction of the year at Sheraton Towers on Sunday was a mostly quiet affair until Indonesian master Ahmad Sadali’s 1965 mixed media on canvas work showed up on the block. Titled Abstraksi Pintu Surga, the abstract work by the late artist was priced at $40,000 but in 10 minutes, a three-way bid drove the hammer price up to $230,000. [...] Mr Benny Raharjo, 49, president of the auction house, said: ‘I did not expect Sadali’s work to sell for $230,000. I thought it would go up to $150,000. Achieving this price is a good achievement for us. It shows that confidence in the art market is returning slowly.’

Art Market Picking Up (Straits Times)

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If any artist can topple Giacometti’s $104 million world record for a work of art at auction, it is Picasso. Last week at the Maastricht art fair, bets were on that Picasso’s Nude, Green Leaves and Bust, from the collection of Mrs Sidney F Brody, could be the one to do it when offered by Christie’s in New York in May. Estimated at $80 million, it compares with Le Rêve, another work from the series, which was to be sold privately for $139 million by Las Vegas hotelier Steve Wynn, before he inadvertently put his elbow through it. Certainly Picasso’s palette boards, on which he mixed his paints, were in record price territory at Maastricht. At the Galerie Krugier, a group from the collection of Picasso’s daughter Marina were priced from €110,000 to €2 million.

Market News (Telegraph)

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[T]he collection numbers 450-plus works. Most are American from the 19th and 20th centuries, but there are also some outstanding foreign examples, such as the 1937 Cubist-derived “Abstraction-Verte” (1937) by the Frenchman Jean Helion, a 1975 Aboriginal bark painting by Walter Djambidjimba and a 2004 photograph of multiple foreign currencies by the contemporary Chinese photographer Hong Hao. There are no budgeted acquisition funds; all art in the permanent collection comes to us through donations. It was my responsibility to vet not only the works before they entered the collection, but the donors to avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest. [...]

If I could have borrowed a work by the British artist Bridget Riley, I am certain Mr. Volcker would have allowed me to hang it in his office. I had come to learn that he liked Op Art.

In 1987 Alan Greenspan began his long tenure as Fed chairman. If I’d thought his background as a jazz musician would translate into bold office décor, I was mistaken. Mr. Greenspan picked two landscapes we owned, Alexander Lawrie’s crisply executed “Pleasant Valley, Essex County, N.Y.” (1867), in the style of the Hudson River School, and Friedrich Konig’s winter “Snowscape” (c. 1900) in the Viennese Secessionist style. Not much irrational exuberance there.

Still, Mr. Greenspan was not without his bolder side. He admired the work of two Dutch masters, Franz Hals, a 17th-century painter known for his bravura brushwork, and Piet Mondrian, a 20th-century pioneer of abstraction. No works by either artist were within our reach, so we decided that a work by Ellsworth Kelly would be a good alternative to Mondrian. [...]

At first, Mr. Bernanke’s choices were what you would expect from a central banker. In 2002, at the beginning of his tenure as a Fed governor, he picked two traditional landscapes: “Harvest Scene, New York State” (c. 1859), a rare American subject by the expatriate artist Thomas Hotchkiss, and an untitled romantic view of a verdurous valley by Arthur F. Bellows. [...]

About 1½ years later, I received an email from Mr. Bernanke asking for a change. This time he picked “Samarkand Stitches #IV,” an assemblage by the American pop artist Robert Rauschenberg. [...] He was absolutely ebullient about the Rauschenberg.

What Fed Chiefs Like (Wall Street Journal)

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As many as 46 works by F N Souza are on auction this month, a pointer to his continuously rising importance and prolific brush. Nineteen of those works, including an unusual Beasts of Prey (estimated value between Rs 92 lakh-1.4 crore), will be auctioned at Christie’s in New York on March 23, followed a day later by five works at Sotheby’s, also in New York. On March 20, in Mumbai, nine drawings and two mixed media works by Souza will form part of Osian’s Masterpieces Series, but the real treasures are at the Saffronart sale on March 10 and 11, when 11 Souzas will enter the market, the most expensive of which isDecomposing Head at Rs 90 lakh-1.12 crore.

These auctions will set prices for this year’s art market in which 88-year-old S H Raza is leading the race with his Gestation (Christies, Rs 2.75-3.70 crore),Germination (Osian’s, Rs 1.2-1.8 crore) and Prakriti Purush (Saffronart, Rs 81-99 lakh) series, and La Mer (Sotheby’s, Rs 46-69 lakh). Raza’s day out is a pointer to how the four auction houses have gone about their pricing — while Christie’s seems to have pushed the envelope, Saffronart and Sotheby’s have decided to stay soft, and Osian’s has hardened prices.

Souza Season in Raza Raj (Business Standard)

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Bloomberg has a few sales from Maastricht:

The 1982 Basquiat painting, showing a black figure and titled “Busted Atlas 2,” fetched $2.4 million. It was sold at the booth of the New York gallery Van de Weghe Fine Art to a German collector, said director Christophe van de Weghe.“Interest in Basquiat has increased because of the retrospective on the artist that’s going to be held at the Fondation Beyeler in Basel in the summer,” Van de Weghe said in an interview. The gallery had also sold two table mobiles by Alexander Calder for $530,000 and 240,000 euros, ($330,170) respectively.

Basquiat Sells, Hirst Pig Tempts at $2.7 Billion Fair (Bloomberg)

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Brett Gorvy, deputy chairman of Christie’s Americas, said he expects the sale to bring in about $100 million. The money will go to Crichton’s widow, children and other heirs and to pay estate taxes. The rules of inheritance for wealthy individuals such as Crichton are rarely simple, and they have provided drama in this case, which combines vast wealth and valuable works of art.

Crichton’s 2007 will provided for the vast majority of his assets, including his art, to be placed in a private trust benefiting his fifth wife, Sherri, his then-teenage daughter from a prior marriage and other family members, friends and employees as well as a charitable foundation. At the time of his death from cancer the following year, his wife was six months’ pregnant with their son, John Michael Todd. The will did not provide for the unborn child.

After the boy’s birth, Sherri Crichton said her husband had been updating his estate plan to include the child, and she petitioned the court to designate him an heir. The author’s daughter from his fourth marriage, Taylor — now a 21-year-old college student living in New York — fought the move, but in October, a Superior Court judge in L.A. ruled that her infant half brother was entitled to a third of their father’s estate. The addition of another beneficiary threw off the complex system Crichton established, but on Monday, Judge Michael Levanas signed off on a plan to rejigger distribution of assets.

Adam Streisand, the attorney who represents Sherri Crichton and her son, said the May art sale would have been necessary to pay the bequests and cover taxes regardless of the need to restructure the trust. ”Art is really not the easiest thing in the world to value, and the auction and the sale will give us liquid assets in which we can start to distribute the estate,” Streisand said. “Everybody agrees that it should occur.”

Christie’s to Auction Off Michael Crichton’s Art Collection (Los Angeles Times)

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At Artspace we get Adel El Siwi, a well-known Egyptian painter who goes in for spiky, witty portraits: think Sue Macartney-Snape’s Social Stereotypes cartoons fed through the brain of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Rose Issa is ploughing everything into Chant Avedissian’s sumptuous pop-culture riffs. Frey Norris is leading with the largest canvas yet from Kate Eric, the collaborative identity of Kate Tedman and Eric Siemans. [...] The Saudi conceptualist (and army major) Abdulnasser Gharem shares a bill with the Egyptian pop-artist Khaled Hafez, the British-Iranian painter Sacha Jafri and Canada’s hi-tech artist Daniel Canogar. Dubai’s own Carbon 12 is coming out with its usual cast of international talents: a splashy fashion rage from the painter Katherine Bernhardt, spooky theatre interiors from Gil Heitor Cortesao and Sara Rahbar’s satirical textile collages among them. Clearly there’s still room for the something-for-everyone approach. [...]

One group show is guaranteed to upstage the solo performances, though it will be a surprise if it adds up to more than the sum of its parts. Three artists from across the Menasa region (Middle East, North Africa and South Asia) have received Dh750,000 apiece from the Abraaj Capital Art Prize (ACAP), the largest art award on the planet. For the last six months they have been trying to produce a trio of ambitious new artworks. Kader Attia, Hala Elkoussy and Marwan Sahmarani (from Algeria, Egypt and Lebanon respectively) are the artists in question and Art Dubai will see the unveiling of their creations. The size of the prize alone means that the new work will be subject to close, and perhaps rather envious, scrutiny, and that puts the artists in a tricky position. They know they’ll be facing the crowd of their lives.

Watch this Space (The National)

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Spray-painting is still a rare sight there, where it’s still mostly associated with acts of vandalism punishable by up to three years in jail or eight strokes of the cane. Only recently a publicity stunt by the postal service involving a masked man spray-painting six mailboxes backfired when scandalized Singaporeans called the police. But a couple of weeks ago, Daze completed a commissioned giant canvas standing in front of a public outdoor amphitheater, all under the watchful—if not puzzled—glare of security guards. The piece (a woman’s eye swimming in a sea of colorful words) is now installed in a shopping center, protected by a rope.

Writing on the Wall (Newsweek)

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The sale can proceed because of concessions made by a secured creditor, First Republic Bank:

U.S. Bankruptcy Court in January approved a settlement between unsecured creditors and Bank of America Corp.’s First Republic unit that cleared the way for an auction. First Republic lent the gallery about $30 million starting in 2002. “The bank had every right to be paid back first from the proceeds of art,” Feinstein said in the interview, citing loan documents.

The bank made “significant concessions” after lawyers for unsecured creditors investigated its relationship with the gallery and threatened to sue, Feinstein said. “We were trying to understand whether the bank knew he was involved in inappropriate behavior,” he said. “And whether it did anything to facilitate it.”

Feinstein wouldn’t say what unsecured creditors found.

Bill Halldin, a First Republic spokesman, said the bank wasn’t aware of wrongdoing by Salander when it lent him money. “In order to avoid the cost and distraction of lengthy litigation, we decided it was the best course to resolve this matter with the other creditors and move forward in the process,” Halldin said in an e-mail.

Under the settlement, unsecured creditors will receive the first $2.5 million from the sale, minus back taxes the gallery owed. What the bank and unsecured creditors ultimately get is based on a complex formula and any sale tally. The court hasn’t ruled yet which creditors get paid.

Salander Art to Be Sold as First Republic Makes Concessions (Bloomberg)

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