There Was More to Standout Auction Than Frida Kahlo

Soon after painting El sueño (La cama), Frida Kahlo and her then ex-husband, Diego Rivera, had to leave Mexico City in a hurry.

They headed to San Francisco, finding sanctuary in the fall of 1940 in a city where they had made an impression a decade before. How they spent Thanksgiving is unknown but on December 8 they were at City Hall getting remarried.

Last week, Kahlo’s surreal self-portrait made international headlines when it sold for $54.66m with fees in New York. It became the most expensive work of art by a female artist an aptly named Exquisite Corpus sale at Sotheby's.

The sales totaled $103m on November 20 and 21, towards their high estimate and boosted lesser known artists’ market, helping it score an A+ on the HENI Auction Index.

The Exquisite Corpus sales featured mostly Surrealist art reportedly collected by the late music mogul and Atlantic Records’ co-founder Nesuhi Ertegun and his wife Selma Ertegun.

The auction over two days of 79 works from the Ertegun estate ranks alongside another recent single-collection sale: the Pauline Karpidas auctions at Sotheby’s in September.

Exquisite Corpus and the Karpidas sales are in the same league as the David Rockefeller and Paul Allen auctions, both at Christie's, albeit a fraction of the size.

The Exquisite Corpus sales made the top of the rankings not by total revenue or number of lots, but by outperforming on other key metrics. The HENI Auction Index is based on 10+ data points.

The number of new artist auction records was 70% higher than typical and outpaced the numbers set in the other high-profile collection sales in New York's marquee week: Leonard Lauder, the Weises of Pennsylavania’s modern masters and at Christie’s, Jay and Cindy Pritzker's art.

Every work in Exquisite Corpus sold, mirroring the Lauder and Pritzker sales’ success.

Also, the 2.5% of lots with weak guarantees and irrevocable bids, was lower than in most recent major collection sales. The percentage of strong guarantees, when works sold above their high estimate, was 4 percentage points higher than average.

Another positive metric was the average number of bidders, at 3.2, which is on a par with comparable single-collection sales.

Thanks to recording artists such as Aretha Franklin, Atlantic Records biggest earning singer in the 1960s, Nesuhi and Selma Ertegun had the means to snap up the Kahlo, for a relative song, and other works by lesser known Surrealists who were then out of fashion.

The sales were notable for the strong performance by artists such as the Romania-born Victor Brauner and Spaniard Oscar Dominguez, both of whom joined the Surrealists in 1930s Paris. The latter’s 1943 work Le Plus clair du temps led the day sale and sold for nearly $900,000 with fees.

For Kahlo and Rivera, 1940 was an annus horibilis. They had to flee Mexico after their friend, and Kahlo’s reputed lover, Leon Trotsky was assassinated. Kahlo’s Paris show in 1939 had been a bitter disappointment and she needed further medical treatment. Rivera had reasons to regret blowing his Rockefeller Center mural commission a few years earlier.

Eighty five years after the “power couple” were licking their wounds on the West Coast, New York came good for Kahlo, confirming Rivera’s faith in his partner’s artistic vision.

Methodology: for how the HENI Auction Index classifies sales, see here