NEW YORK, NY.- Sotheby’s 13 & 14 November 2013 sales of Contemporary Art in New York will include property from the highly esteemed Dia Art Foundation sold to establish an endowment for acquisitions. Works by Cy Twombly, John Chamberlain, and Barnett Newman will be offered in both the Evening and Day auctions and together, the group of nearly 30 works is estimated to bring in excess of $20 million. Beginning in September, highlights will be shown in Chicago, Los Angeles, Doha, London and Zurich before the pre-sale exhibition opens in New York on 9 November.
Tobias Meyer, Worldwide Head of Contemporary Art at Sotheby’s said: “Dia is widely recognized as one of the preeminent Contemporary art institutions in the world and it’s a privilege for Sotheby’s to have this opportunity to celebrate the great history of Dia while supporting the ambitious plans for strengthening its permanent collection.”
Philippe Vergne, Director, Dia Art Foundation, said, "Dia has been honored to have been the steward of these important works of art. The sale of these works will help establish an endowment for acquisitions, allowing Dia to reflect on its collection, deepen its relationships with living artists today and in the future, and continue its tradition of in-depth, single-artist presentations.”
Cy Twombly
As part of its commitment to presenting an individual artist in great depth, Dia partnered with the Menil Collection and Cy Twombly to create the Cy Twombly Gallery in Houston, Texas in 1991. Dia’s rich history with Twombly is represented in the November auctions by a selection of fourteen works by the artist that provide a retrospective view of his indomitable career. The broad and varied selection demonstrates his mastery of drawing using graphite, wax crayon, colored pencil, oil paint and collage on paper. The outstanding highlight of the group is Poems to the Sea, which epitomizes Twombly’s poetic dialect in a suite of 24 drawings (est. $6/8 million). The group has long been widely recognized as among the artist’s foremost triumphs, and is respected as a critical early touchstone for the subsequent evolution of his entire career.
In July and August 1959 Twombly moved to Sperlonga, a small whitewashed Saracen fishing village between Rome and Naples with his new wife Tatiana Franchetti. This summer became a pivotal moment in the development of Twombly’s artistic future with the classical ruins he was now surrounded with becoming an important reference point in his work. Conceived that summer, Poems to the Sea represents a sudden outpouring of a new, unrestrained creativity and the methodological breakthrough of oil paint from tubes which, unlike house paint, stood up from the surface.
Other Twombly highlights include – Idilli, a magnificent triptych comprised of collage on paper from 1976, (est. $1.5/2 million) and Untitled, an impressive diptych also from 1976 (est. $650/850,000).
John Chamberlain
Dia has been closely associated with John Chamberlain since it was founded in 1974 and retains one of the largest museum collections of the artist’s work. His crushed metal structures stand as one of the most distinctive and significant contributions to sculpture in the 20th century. Shortstop from 1958 was the first of these to include automobile parts and as such can be considered Chamberlain’s pivotal creative breakthrough and one of the artist’s most significant works (est. $1.5/2 million). The piece was created in the summer of 1958 when Chamberlain and his wife rented Larry Rivers’ house in Southampton, New York. In the yard of the house there was a rusting, wrecked 1929 Ford pie wagon: Chamberlain pulled off its fenders and shaped them by running them over with his car, before welding them together to create Shortstop.
Other Chamberlain highlights include Swannanoa/Swannanoa II which was started in 1959, the year following Shortstop, (est. $1.5/2 million), Candy Andy from 1963 (est. $2/3 million) and a number of later works from the 1970s and 80s such as Hurray for Bernie Galvez (3 cents Under the Limit) (est. $600/800,000).
Barnett Newman
The Abstract Expressionist master Barnett Newman is also represented in the sale with Genesis – The Break from 1946 which was included in the critically acclaimed exhibition of the artist’s work at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2002 (est. $3.5/4.5 million). This follows the new benchmark price for the artist that was set by Sotheby’s New York in May 2013.
