ART AND MONEY
Rubell
would like to own Jeff Koons’s Rabbit (1986), he says, if it weren’t
for the $5 million it would likely cost him. What he would “truly, truly die
for,” says Rubell, would be to acquire all of the paintings in Luc Tuymans’s
“Diagnostic View” series (1992), which are now in separate collections. “What
we most want in life, we often can’t have. My mother taught me that when I was
young,” says Rubell. “But we should all dream. It’s very healthy.” Such
aspirations can lead to tantalizing offers. “A collector who has no intention
of selling can be quite flattered by the kind of prices he can get for a
work,” says de Pury. “The magnitude of an offer can be quite tempting.” Or as
Old Master dealer Otto Naumann says, “You cannot make a painting for sale
unless you want to grossly overpay for it.”
Photo: Rabbit, 1986, Stainless steel, 41 x 19 x 12 in., sold for $5 millions.
A collector with his heart set on obtaining an early de Kooning recently offered Seattle collector Jane Lang Davis $8 million for her Town Square (1948), a small black-and-white painting. “I couldn’t believe it,” says Davis, who paid $90,000 for the work in 1976. “It shows you how hard it is to get these works at this point.” Asked if she accepted the offer, Davis laughs, “No. Where would I get another one?” For many years, Davis says, New York dealer Larry Gagosian tried to persuade her to sell her large 1963 Rothko, for which she paid $75,000 in 1972. Gagosian’s last offer was $5 million, Davis says, and that was a few years ago, before the artist’s 1958 No. 9 (White and Black on Wine) brought a record $16.4 million last spring at Christie’s. (Gagosian declined to comment for this article.) According to New York dealer and Marcel Duchamp scholar Francis Naumann, the most-wanted Duchamp work in private hands is the artist’s original L.H.O.O.Q. (1919), a postcard-size reproduction of the Mona Lisa defaced by Duchamp with a mustache and goatee. Some years ago, Naumann says, he approached the owner, who was living in Paris at the time and whom Naumann declined to identify, to ask if he might consider selling it. “He asked if I knew the highest price ever paid for a work of art,” Naumann recalls. “I said I thought it was around $65 million, having forgotten about the van Gogh. He said, ‘Okay. Bring me a collector willing to pay $66 million dollars, and we’ll talk.’” Gund was recently offered $30 million for her 1956 de Kooning, The Time of the Fire, one in a series of abstract paintings of urban subjects the artist created from 1955 to 1956. Another work in the series, Police Gazette (1955), has been acquired by Geffen from Wynn, who paid $11.9 million for it in 1998. Gund declined to sell her de Kooning, explaining, “It’s a museum picture. I think the Modern will probably get it in honor of Kirk Varnedoe,” the Modern’s late chief curator of painting and sculpture. A trustee of the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association recently tried to persuade Warner to sell his 1785 Robert Edge Pine life portrait of George Washington to the association. When Warner declined, he says, he suspected she was “looking forward to my imminent demise.” As for Cole’s The Falls of Kaaterskill, for which he paid $175,000 in 1970, Warner says, people “slyly bring up Bill Gates’s name to me all the time.” Gates, a driving force in the American art market, has paid record prices for paintings in recent years, including $20 million for Childe Hassam’s The Room of Flowers (1894); $10 million for William Merritt Chase’s The Nursery (ca. 1890); $27.5 million for George Bellows’s Polo Crowd (1910); and $36 million for Winslow Homer’s Lost on the Grand Banks (1885). Warner says he’s been told the Cole is worth $15 million; he thinks it’s worth $30 million. Regardless, Warner says, it’s not for sale. Making wishes come true doesn’t come cheap or easy. The Modern recently sold Francis Bacon’s painting Dog (1952) in order to acquire a triptych by the artist. (Dog went to London dealer Gerard Faggionato for more than $8 million, according to sources.) The Modern also sold a 1909 Picasso Cubist landscape, Houses on the Hill, Horta de Ebro, left to the museum by Nelson Rockefeller, in order to acquire a superior example of the same subject. (It went to Berlin collector Heinz Berggruen, sources say, who paid around $12 million for it. Berggruen did not return phone calls seeking comment.) Likewise the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston recently sold two Degas pastels and a Renoir portrait at Sotheby’s for $16 million in order to acquire Degas’s masterpiece Duchessa di Montejasi with Her Daughters, Elena and Camilla (1876), one of the last great family portraits by the artist. Other factors, aside from finances, can also come into play. It took Michigan collector Gilbert Silverman more than a decade to track down a work that he first saw hanging from the ceiling at the Paula Cooper Gallery in New York a dozen or so years ago. “I thought, ‘Boy, that would be a neat thing to get,’” recalls Silverman. When a dealer recently called Silverman to tell him she had found the unique work he’d been looking for, Silverman replied, “Well, that’s half the battle.” Silverman still had to convince his wife to allow him to acquire the work: a bronze double dildo by Lynda Benglis. (He won’t say what he paid for it.) “Initially she said ‘Forget it.’ She didn’t want it hanging in the office,” says Silverman. “But we have separate bathrooms. And she said I could hang it in mine.”