A new Lempicka in Madonna’s collection?
Art dealers and collectors mumbled polite phrases like “waiting for Whitney” and “dress rehearsal” last night as they poured out of Christie’s Rockefeller Center salesroom after a thin sale of Impressionist and modern art.
The auction, the first of six important evening sales this week and next, had the misfortune to be a curtain-raiser to Sotheby’s sale of the legendary Whitney collection. First formed by the heirs of Payne and Helen Whitney, who made a fortune made from oil, tobacco, street railways and real estate, and later by their son John Hay Whitney, the financier, publisher and ambassador to Britain, and his wife, Betsey Cushing Roosevelt Whitney, it is now part of the Greentree Foundation’s holdings. Among those works, to be sold tonight, is a 1903 Picasso, “Boy With a Pipe,” that could become the world’s most expensive painting, along with world-class works by masters like Manet and Degas.
By far the most exciting – and most unexpected – moment came with Lempicka‘s “Portrait of Mrs. Bush,” a 1929 portrait of Joan Jeffrey, a New York socialite, commissioned by Rufus T. Bush when they were engaged. Their marriage lasted only a few years, and when they divorced, Mrs. Bush placed it in storage, where it remained for nearly 60 years; it was being sold by her heirs. Two determined telephone bidders vied for the portrait, which sold for $4.5 million, nearly three times its high estimate of $1.6 million and a record for the artist. When Mr. Burge took the winning bid, the audience burst into applause. After the sale, some people speculated that the buyer might have been Madonna, who is known to collect works by the artist. Christie’s said only that the buyer was an American collector.
Source: New York Times