Every once in a while some great art buying opportunities come along and the auctioning off of the Lehman works looks like a good one.
Bloomberg News: Lehman Works on Billions in Debt With $300 Photo, $500 Drawings:
Link to Bloomberg story here.
By Lindsay Pollock
“Oct. 10 (Bloomberg) — A $300 photograph and a few $500 drawings from the art collection of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. go on sale Nov. 1 at a time when the bank owes creditors as much as $250 billion.
Bidders in the auction won’t need wallets as large as Richard Fuld’s, the chief executive officer when Lehman failed last year. One of the highest-estimated lots at Freeman’s in Philadelphia is Roy Lichtenstein’s 1982 homage to the Statue of Liberty, ‘I Love Liberty,’ expected to fetch as much as $25,000.
The 283-lot sale is estimated to tally up to $760,800 — part of an estimated $1.1 million in artworks the bank is hawking this fall and winter. Lehman filed the biggest U.S. bankruptcy in September 2008, with assets of $639 billion.
Appealing flower drawings and monotypes by Michael Mazur, whose works are owned by many American museums, is priced about $500. A black-and-white photograph by Joel Greenberg, ‘Brooklyn Bridge, Night,’ is estimated to sell for between $300 and $500.
Barclays, which purchased Lehman’s headquarters and North American brokerage last year, had a one-year option to buy the art. It declined to purchase the works, which had been removed from offices, storerooms, clubrooms and executive dining rooms.
The sale items are now available for armchair previewing on Freeman’s Web site. Printed catalogs are expected to be ready this coming week.
Prints by artists such as Alex Katz, Louise Bourgeois and Wayne Thiebaud are tagged with lowball estimates of a few thousand dollars. Works by lesser-known names such as Driss Ouadahi are also priced in the low thousands.
The sale comes with the ultimate recession-era bidder bait: works priced at less than $10,000 are being sold without reserve. This means they will be sold, regardless how low the price.
‘Distressed Price’
‘This is really an opportunity to get work by a well-known name, and maybe at a distressed price,’ said art consultant Sharon Coplan Hurowitz.
‘This is attractive art, reasonably priced and nicely framed,’ said Anne Henry, Freeman’s vice president of modern and contemporary art. ‘It’s ready to go on the wall.’
A set of three 2003 Richard Artschwager prints estimated to sell for more than $2,500, retail for about $7,500, according to print publisher Harlan & Weaver.
The collection is mostly American, spanning the modernist 1930s to today. Some works are dated 2008, suggesting the Lehman curators were buying art right up until the bitter end.
Overall the grouping is a hodgepodge, reflecting the nature of corporate collections that morph with management tastes, art trends, curators and company mergers. While the goods are eclectic, the artwork is conservative, befitting bank walls.
‘American Realism’
‘It’s a snapshot of American realism,’ said New York art adviser Wendy Cromwell, who works with corporate and private collections. ‘It’s not part of the avant-garde, but it has a place in art history.’
The sale is organized in a loose chronological order. Among the earliest works are 1930s Louis Lozowick’s black-and-white New York-themed prints of the Williamsburg Bridge and Hanover Square.
Lehman is selling 650 lots through Freeman’s, including the 283 lots up for sale Nov. 1. Additional Lehman property sells on Dec. 6 and Feb. 12, 2010.
‘For people who have strong stomachs and don’t care about the vagaries of the art market,’ said Cromwell, ‘there are some bargains to be had.’”
(Via Lindsay Pollock.)