A $35 Million de Kooning Painting and a $25 Million Monet Are Among the Highlights of New York’s Fall Auction Season

Sotheby’s has revealed two of the major lots of the fall auction
season in New York: an “extremely rare” Willem de Kooning
painting offered by art dealer Robert Mnuchin, father of US Treasury Secretary
Steven Mnuchin, on behalf of an undisclosed seller;
and Claude Monet’s Charing Cross Bridge, which
will lead the house’s Impressionist and Modern art evening
sale.

The abstract de Kooning work, titled Untitled
XXII, is estimated to sell for between $25 million and $35
million. Although that range lags behind the current de
Kooning record, $66.3 million set three
years ago for a painting from 1977, it would place the work
among the artist’s top-five auction records, according to the
artnet Price Database. There is a
guarantee on the work, as well as an irrevocable bid from a third
party, ensuring that the painting will sell.

In recent years, de Kooning collectors such as Ken Griffin—who
paid $300 million for
Interchange in 2016—and Steve
Cohen have opted to conduct their major transactions privately,
suppressing the artist’s auction track record.

The de Kooning painting up for sale next month was purchased by
the current owner in 2004 from New York’s Mitchell-Innes and Nash
gallery. It was one of roughly 100 de Kooning paintings that the
gallery priced between $500,000 and $3 million, while representing
the artist’s estate for a few years after his death, in 1997.

Untitled XXII “was one of the best from that
period,” gallery co-owner David Nash told Bloomberg.
“Now, 15 years later, they are extremely rare. They’ve been
dispersed to private collections and museums.”

The Monet estimate is also well below the artist’s auction
record, which has shot up in recent years. After holding steady at
$80.3 million from 2008 to 2016, a new top price for the
Impressionist has been achieved three times in the past three
years. A haystack canvas, Meule, sold for $81.4 million
at Christie’s New York in November 2016 and Nymphéas en
fleur went for $84.7 million at the Peggy
and David Rockefeller auction at Christie’s New York in May
2018 before a different haystack
painting, Meules, sold for $110.7 million
at Sotheby’s New York this May.

But the Charing Cross Bridge remains one of Monet’s most
revisited subjects, with 37 paintings in the series completed
between 1899 and 1905. Examples belong to institutions including
the Art Institute of Chicago, the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in
Madrid, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts,
Boston.

The painting was purchased by Andrea Klepetar-Fallek and
her fourth husband, Fred Fallek, in 1977 through Basel’s Galerie
Beyeler. Charing Cross Bridge was among the gems of
their collection, hanging over the living room couch. Fallek died
in 1983; Klepetar-Fallek died this past May.

Born Andrea Samek in 1920, Klepetar-Fallek was a survivor
of the Holocaust who fled her native Vienna and escaped an Italian
concentration camp.

She moved to Israel in 1948 before settling in Argentina. After
the death of her third husband, Juan Klepetar, and the rise of the
Peronist government, Klepetar-Fallek moved to New York in 1972.
There, she met Fallek, a fellow Holocaust survivor who had lost his
art collection to his ex-wife in their divorce. The two then
established a tradition of giving each other works of art for each
birthday and anniversary.

The upcoming sale also includes other works
from Klepetar-Fallek’s collection, such as Pierre
Bonnard’s Femme se déshabillant, estimated at $1.5
million to $2.5 million; Lyonel Feininger’s Hästende Leute
(Hurried People), estimated at $100,000 to $150,000; and
Emile Nolde’s Rote Dahlien (Red Dahlias), estimated at
$60,000 to $80,000.

The post A $35 Million de Kooning Painting and a $25 Million
Monet Are Among the Highlights of New York’s Fall Auction
Season appeared first on artnet News.