‘The New York Sales’
Sotheby’s, 1334 York Avenue, New York, NY
May 6-17, 2024

Money and masterpieces will converge at Sotheby’s this week for the house’s New York Sales. The cornucopia is up for auction, and will soon dip out of view, sequestered in salons and locked in living rooms. Those admitted to an early viewing looked at the ravishing canvases as would foodies scanning the menu at, say, Le Bernardin. One woman whispered to her companion that a Monet was a bargain, like a discounted dress at Nordstrom Rack. 

The most indelible work is “Les Distractions de Dragobert,” by the Surrealist Leonora Carrington. In the vein of the Renaissance mystic Hieronymus Bosch, it was painted in 1945 in the post-war artistic hothouse of Mexico City. Dragobert was a debauched Merovingian monarch, and this head spinning tableaux remixes Celtic myth, Mayan cosmology, and the dream logic of the Kabbalah with Carrington’s fervid yet technically exact imagination. 

The $12 to $18 million that Carrington is expected to fetch is dwarfed by the $30 to $50 million Sotheby’s hopes to collect from Francis Bacon’s “Portrait of George Dyer Crouching.” Bacon painted his lover 10 times, and this is the first in that series. It is an inside out pulping, all bruised purple and venom green. Dyer is shirtless and feral, muscled with precision and blurred with desire. The face is both Dyer’s and Bacon’s, a mangled Narcissus. 

Also hanging in the emporium of stratospheric value is Claude Monet’s Meules à Giverny, from 1893. Painted in a meadow just to the south of the pond that would serve as inspiration for his water lillies, this Impressionist rendering appears to sway with the deliberate and gentle force of an autumn breeze. The haystack sits rotund and satisfied in the painting’s center, the lean of the trees underscoring its confected gathering, sensibly awaiting summer.

A different landscape is on offer in “Le Banquet,” by René Magritte, from 1955. He painted variations on this scene many times, but this portrait of a forest, backlit in orange, seems drawn from a fairy tale gone wrong. The painting’s strangeness is delivered by the bright red sun painted onto the trees. It is almost a cutout, and could resonate with an audience just weeks removed from a total solar eclipse. The painting has the tonality of an off-kilter orbit. 

The Magritte could set a purchaser back between $12 and $18 million. Sportsmen and women hunting for a bargain could be drawn to an early Picasso, Courses de taureaux, from 1901. Crafted with a thick impasto, it vibrantly — if a little crudely — captures the thrill of the bloody sport.The partial view and falling shadows suggest the memory of a day out, like Pablo could have had as a child, commemorated with burnt skin and hoarse lungs.

The price tag of five to seven million dollars for that work exceeds the estimated one million, give or take a few hundred thousand, that is pegged for another genius’s callow work — Vincent van Gogh’s “Peasant Woman, Head.” Dating from 1885, this work sits between a study and a portrait, exuding a dignity that feels just a touch affected on the part of the artist. Its subject is possessed of a determined gaze and stiff upper lip. That same year he would triumph in “The Potato Eaters.” This is a partial glimpse.

An extensive lot of works by Joan Mitchell will tempt devotees of abstract expressionism, as will a sullen Rothko. A collaboration between Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, “Untitled,” spans a whole room, though purists might not thrill to its busy and brassy collage. A smoother and simpler work of art, though, is on display on the first floor — a McLaren F1 029, one of the lowest mileage such machines known to man. For $20 million, it could be yours.