Auction Week A Boon For Some, A Bust For Others

Despite a couple of less-than-stellar sales, New York's spring photo auctions showed evidence of a market that continues to expand while prices for established artists keep going up.

Sotheby's had the best week of the three major auction houses. Twenty-five pieces fetched six-figures, two of the three sales sold out completely and the combined total of $8.7 million made the week's auctions the highest-grossing photography series ever at Sotheby's.

Sotheby's reaped the highest hammer price of the week with Diane Arbus's "Identical Twins," which set an artist record at auction by selling for $478,400. Sotheby's also set new highs for Edward Weston, Robert Frank, Walker Evans and Carlton E. Watkins.

"We took photographs from people I would consider blue chip people, and just when we think they can't go any higher, low and behold the do," says Denise Bethel, director of Sotheby's photographs department and auctioneer for the sales. "The strength of the market is absolutely incredible."

Bethel attributes the rise in price for Arbus and Watkins in part to recent career retrospectives originating at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (MOMA).

Christie's lone auction netted a respectable $3.7 million. The auction house set a new world auction record for Alvin Langdon Coburn, whose "Shadows and Reflections, Venice, 1905" sold for $365,900 to an American private collector.

Depending on who you talk to, prices for Helmut Newton's nudes continue to rise either because of or in spite of the artist's death last year. Newton's "Panoramic Nude with Gun, Villa d'Este, Como, 1989," which sold for $181,100 at Christie's, was the highest price for any Newton sold during the week.

The only disappointing sales came from third-place auction house Phillips de Pury & Company, which did well with only one of its three auctions.

Phillips sold less than half the lots from its auction of Magnum photographs, though director of photographs Joshua Holdeman says sales continued into the next week. (Auction houses generally have a month after a sale to accept bids.)

Magnum had hoped to raise close to $1 million from the sale, but the auction closed on a total hammer price of $570,060.

The auction's largest lot, a set of 302 prints from assorted Magnum photographers estimated at $300,000 to $400,000, went unsold.

Buyers showed the most interest in one-of-a-kind items like book maquettes by Bruce Davidson and Leonard Freed. Davidson's maquette of his classic East 100^th Street, printed by the artist in the late 1960s, brought an auction-high bid of $136,800. Freed's Black in White America maquette from 1963 fetched $38,400.

Phillips' other disappointing sale was "A Century of Fine Photographs 1840s-1940s," from the private collection of art dealer Alex Novak. Holdeman admits that Phillips may have misjudged the market for 19^th century material.

"The 19^th century market has a whole mystique of finding and uncovering objects that have been hidden for hundreds of years," Holdeman says. Because Novak's material has been on the market before, Holdeman says many collectors viewed it as less than fresh.

Phillips did better with its sale of work by contemporary fine art photographers. Its largest sale featured iconic works by Arbus, Larry Clark, Gregory Crewdson and William Eggleston.

Phillips set world records for Clark and Crewdson, and set its own record for Eggleston, whose vintage print of "Greenwood, Mississippi, 1973" fetched $217,440.

Holdeman says Phillips has exceeded its own mark for Eggleston in each of its last four sales. The market for Clark and Garry Winogrand continues to expand at a rapid rate, Holdeman says, and though the market for Robert Adams is comparatively small, the artist's works continue to be "snapped up" by institutions.

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