Works by Henri Matisse, Gustave Courbet, and Kehinde Wiley sold at the fall edition of TEFAF in New York.
The fall 2019 edition of the TEFAF New York fair. Photo by Mark Niedermann, courtesy TEFAF.
The fall edition of The European Fine Art Fair (TEFAF) in New York featured 91 exhibitors proffering a mix of exquisite decorative art objects, Old Master paintings, Modern masterpieces, contemporary showpieces, and more. As the art market revved up for its final sprint of the year—next week’s New York fall auctions, followed by Art Basel in Miami Beach—TEFAF saw a range of sales across its many categories, from a Louis Comfort Tiffany fireplace to a Henri Matisse drawing and a Kehinde Wiley sculpture.
Notable sales at the fair, which wrapped up on Tuesday, included:
- London-based dealer Michael Goedhuis sold Guan Zhi’s ink painting, Feather of Angel (2019), for $175,000.
- Gallery 19C of Beverly Hills closed major sales in the fair’s first hours, finding new homes for Gustave Courbet’s Low Tide in Normandy (1865–69), which had an asking price of $175,000, and Dutch painter Nicholas Wilhelm Jungmann’s The Rosary (ca. 1900), for $50,000.
- New York-based Old Masters dealer Jack Kilgore sold a self-portrait by the Danish artist Valdemar Henrik Nicolai Irminger, which had an asking price of $95,000, and Sunflowers (1935) by the German painter Josef Scharl, which had an asking price of $155,000.
- Munich’s Galerie Thomas sold a gouache-on-paper work by Wassily Kandinsky, Oui (1937), for an undisclosed price.
A visitor at the fall 2019 edition of the TEFAF New York fair. Photo by Kirsten Chilstrom, courtesy TEFAF.
- London’s Stephen Ongpin sold a Henri Matisse drawing A Standing Female Nude (1950) for an undisclosed price.
- Rob Smeets, an Old Masters dealer based in Geneva, sold the tiny, ornate double portrait Juana and Isabel de Aragon y Pernstein (ca. 1598–99) by Antonio Ricci for an undisclosed sum.
- Robilant + Voena, which has outposts in London, Milan, and St. Moritz, notched four sales, including an 1838 portrait of the Hungarian composer Franz Liszt by Friedrich von Amerling, and Adoration (1954), a glazed ceramic piece by Lucio Fontana.
- Munich- and London-based Kunstkammer Georg Laue sold artworks spanning nearly a millennium, including an Anglo-Saxon Tau cross dated to around the 11th century bought by a New York collector, Johann Michael Düchert’s Sculpture of a flying Devil (ca. 1780), and an Ottoman silver box in the shape of a pinecone, dated to the 19th century, that was acquired by a U.S. institution.
- The New York-based collective Breakfast found buyers for two of their interactive works about climate change, Mauna Loa Air (2019) and Venice Water (2019), for $25,000 each.
- New York-based Tiffany lamp specialist Lillian Nassau sold an iron fireplace from Louis Comfort Tiffany’s famed Laurelton Hall estate to a U.S. institution for an undisclosed price.
- New York gallery Taylor | Graham sold Dutch Modernist Leo Gestel’s 1908 painting Nacht (Amstelburg in Amsterdam) (1908) for an undisclosed price.
- New York dealer Sean Kelly sold two editions of Kehinde Wiley’s Rumors of War (2019)—smaller versions of the dramatic equestrian sculpture the artist recently unveiled in Times Square—and an ink-on-paper piece by Sol LeWitt, Red Grid, Yellow Circles, Black Arcs From Four Sides and Blue Arcs from Four Corners (1972), all for undisclosed prices.
