The work was painted by Thomas Taylor when he was 23 years old. In 1997, it was featured on the first-edition covers of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (published outside the UK as Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone). To commemorate the book’s 25-year anniversary, Bloomsbury Publishing created a commemorative reprint of the famed book with Taylor’s illustration on the cover.

The painting surpassed its $400,000–$600,000 pre-auction estimate, and has now increased in value by more than 1,650 percent since it was first auctioned in 2001. At that time, when Sotheby’s London auctioned the piece, it exceeded expectations, fetching a $107,000 (£85,750) price tag.

Sotheby’s has not identified the person who bought the watercolor this time.

In addition to the watercolor, a handwritten manuscript of J.K. Rowling’s The Tales of Beedle the Bard, a book of fictional fairy tales referenced in Harry Potter, is also in the sale. The manuscript is expected to garner between $250,000 and $350,000. Bidding for the item comes to a close on Friday.

According to a press release signed by Sebastian Fahey, Sotheby’s managing director of global fine art, Helena Newman, who has served as chairman of Sotheby’s Europe since 2016, has been named worldwide chairman of Impressionist and Modern Art. Newman will pull double duty, retaining her roles as European chairman and auctioneer.

In Asia, Sotheby’s has brought on the Hong Kong-based specialist Elaine Holt, who worked at Christies for over a decade, most recently as deputy chairman and international director of Christie’s Asia Pacific. Holt’s role as head of the Modern and Contemporary Art team in Asia will be bolstered by two new senior specialists in Contemporary art, Joseph Yang who joins us from the Chinese auction house Poly and former Sotheby’s employee Boris Cornelissen, who left the house in 2020 to run his own gallery in Australia.

Holt’s new position comes at a precarious time in the Asian art market tensions rise between China, the US, and Taiwan, which could forecast unfavorable economic and security implications, and Beijing juggling the a real estate crisis that could prove disastrous. Still, Asia has been a major target for all the auction houses in recent years with all Christie’s, Phillips, Sotheby’s, and Bonhams making moves to strengthen their presence in the region. In 2022 Sotheby’s announced a new Asia headquarters, a 24,000 square foot space in Hong Kong’s luxury hub, Landmark Chater, which is set to open this year. 

Alex Branczik and Max Moore, who together led the Modern and Contemporary business in Asia for the last three years will move head back to London and New York, respectively, also with new titles and responsibilities. Branczik will become chairman and head of Modern and Contemporary art Europe, while Moore will become head of Sotheby’s Sealed and senior private sales specialist for Modern and Contemporary art. 

James Sevier, who for three years worked as European head of Contemporary art, has transitioned to deputy chairman of Contemporary art, Europe, a position which, according to the press release, “will provide him space to work more closely with his portfolio of major clients.” Auctioneer and deputy chairman of Contemporary art, London, Michael Macaulay will move into Sevier’s position as head of Contemporary art, Europe while retaining his deputy chairman title.

SOTHEBY’S SUMMER SALES. Today, Sotheby’s London begins its modern and contemporary art auction with an evening sale that features works from the Ralph I. Goldenberg collection, including a $30 million Basquiat. The auctions are set against the backdrop of a subdued art market, and will be closely watched for that reason. But it’s not just market observers who will be looking on: Yayoi Kusama fans will be, too. Sotheby’s is holding an online, “sealed” sale of a “one-of-a-kind” work by her, Yue Ting Kong reports in the Value. The Kusama piece, completed in 2021, is a small “Infinity Mirror Room” titled Phantom Polka Dots of Fate, Ordained by Heaven, Were the Greatest Gift Ever for Me , and is estimated between around $1.5 million to $2.3 million. The “sealed” auction format has previously only been used by Sotheby’s for luxury goods. “The winning bid is never revealed and the whole system is meant to generate more publicity for sales,” Kong notes.

ASPEN FAIR DEBUT. The Aspen Art Fair is launching its inaugural edition in late July, and taking along with it a chunk of exhibitors from the previously existing Intersect Aspen Art and Design Fair, including Perrotin and Gmurzynska galleries, Harrison Jacobs and Sarah Douglas report in ARTnews. Cofounded by Becca Hoffman and Bob Chase, respectively the former director of the  Outsider Art Fair and current owner of Aspen’s Hexton Gallery, the new fair will take place in the historic, red brick Hotel Jerome. Some of the 30 participating exhibitors will take over rooms in the Victorian hotel, and others will set up booths in the building’s public spaces. The program will also include talks, performances, and screenings, and will coincide with Aspen Art Week.

The Digest

An exhibition about colonialism at the Albertinum in Dresdenwas canceled hours before it was due to open June 18, after its curator and author, Zoé Samudzi, refused to open the show. Samudzi later stated her reasons were related to “actions by the institution that felt repressive and did not allow me to speak freely about genocide denial without qualification.” She also noted that “Germany continues to deny the genocide of the Ovaherero and Nama” people, in what is now Namibia, between 1904 and 1908, and claimed that the institution had said that was only her opinion. [Der Spiegel]

The National Coalition Against Censorship has criticized the cancelation and postponement of Kehinde Wiley exhibitions following allegations of sexual assault which the artist has denied. The group said the accusations were serious, but museums were “not equipped or mandated to be enforcers of moral orthodoxy.” [Artnet News]

A tourist was caught carving the name “Ali” into the wall of an archaeological site in Pompeii. Italian authorities said the unnamed man, who is reportedly from Kazakhstan, will be required to pay for restoring the rare plaster wall in the 2nd-century BCE villa, known as the House of the Ceii. [The Daily Mail]

Saudi Arabia has revealed plans for a tech-focused performing arts center in Qiddiya, outside Riyadh. The 500,000-square-meter Qiddiya Performing Arts Center will host over 260 yearly performances, plus gaming and e-sports, in a complex that is set to welcome some 10 million annual visitors by 2030. [The National]

The Paris Olympic Games opening ceremony on July 26 will feature sustainably designed costumes, with looks by Louis Vuitton and Dior, as well as emerging designers. This will be the first time the outfits for the event are designed to reduce their carbon emissions, said Daphné Bürki, the styling and costumes director for the event. [WWD]

The Kicker

EXHIBITION SLOWDOWN. How many times have you realized you were about to miss another great exhibition that was about to close? Julia Halperin has lost count, she writes in an Art Newspaper report. “Over the past two decades, the art world has expanded dramatically, and museum programming has ballooned along with it,” she notes. But some museums are rethinking the art world’s fast pace, particularly when they rely on tourism, and are instead embracing a slower, more seasonal model hinged on vacation periods, while attempting to offer a deeper experience overall. The idea is to also encourage multiple visits. “It’s not just the pursuit of the new,” said Eric Crosby, director of the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. There are also working conditions to consider, rising shipping and storage costs, and environmental concerns. Crosby asked: “Why close an exhibition that took three years to put together after just three months?” Many of us have been wondering the same thing.

That puts the Paris auction house three blocks from its current location. The move is scheduled for mid-October, and is part of a larger strategy to expand Sotheby’s presence in France.

The house has previously announced plans to relocate two of its other spaces. In July, it will open a new Hong Kong location, and in 2025, Sotheby’s will move its New York space to the Marcel Breuer–designed Brutalist structure completed in 1966 for the Whitney Museum.

Sotheby’s new Paris headquarters will cover more than 10,800 square feet across five floors, offering 30 percent more exhibition space than its current location in the French capital. The venue, which is not far from the Champs-Élysées, will house a café and a wine cellar with a tasting area, and play host to year-round master classes, dining, and, of course, auctions.

The new Paris location will support Sotheby’s 15 specialist departments, covering areas such as ancient, modern, and contemporary art, as well as Asian and African art, design, luxury goods, and jewelry.

Upstairs will be a luxury showroom called “the Salon,” with items for sale at fixed prices, as well as rooms dedicated to private sales. Additional areas in the new Paris headquarters will provide spaces for concerts, parties, conferences, cocktail parties, fashion shows, and dinners. The auction house’s “state-of-the-art scenographic and technical equipment” will enable the exhibition of a wide range of works and objects.

The building was once the site of Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, which closed in 2019 after more than a century in business. The gallery held Van Gogh’s first retrospective and once employed famed art critic Félix Fénéon.

Mario Tavella, president of Sotheby’s France and chairman of Sotheby’s Europe, said the move “underscores our commitment to France and highlights the growing importance of the French art and luxury markets to our company.”

The building will feature restored Art Deco elements, modern amenities, and sustainable lighting, and will be accessible to people with reduced mobility. Access to both exhibitions and auctions will be free to the public. According to the house’s announcement, there will be more than 15 miles of cable installed in the new space to ensure the house’s “digital prowess” and global connectivity.

Paris’s reputation as a European art market hub has grown considerably in recent years, with galleries and art fairs, including the recently rechristened Art Basel Paris, moving to the French capital. 

When most people talk about the art market, they talk about the pieces by Pablo Picasso, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jeff Koons, and others that regularly sell for tens of millions of dollars. What those observers don’t talk about, most of the time, is South Asian art.

“Historically, in the larger art world, Indian art, Bangladeshi art, and Pakistani art has been severely undervalued,” art adviser and art dealer Arushi Kapoor told ARTnews. But that is starting to change as the prices for South Asian artists rise, even as talk of a market correction continues.

This past March, Sotheby’s brought in $19.8 million for its South Asian modern and contemporary art evening sale during Asia Week New York. Last year, the same sale made less than half that, just $7 million. In 2020, just before lockdown set in, Sotheby’s brought in $4.8 million at its South Asian modern and contemporary art evening sale during Asia Week. 

“This market has come a long way, even in the last four or five years,” Manjari Sihare-Sutin, vice president and worldwide co-head Sotheby’s modern and contemporary South Asian art department, told ARTnews.

Experts said there were several factors behind this rise in activity: more high-quality lots coming to auction, a growing collector base, and the shrinking availability of work by the Progressive Artists Group, a network of modernists that was active in post-Partition India.

Nishad Avari, the New York–based head of Christie’s South Asian modern and contemporary art department, which also brought in nearly $20 million for its Asia Week sale in March, described a sense of competition among collectors for works such as those. “They realized that if there are museums participating in the acquisition process, those works are never going to come back to market,” he explained. “So, they have to step up the level at which they compete.”

“There’s real demand from Indian citizens that don’t want to send the best works abroad,” Kapoor said. “They want to keep the best works in their house.”

And while the category has grown to include artists such as Nasreen Mohamedi, Nilima Sheikh, Zubeida Agha, and Zainul Abedin, the biggest sales have been and continue to be for works by male Indian artists.

These include new auction records for Indian modernists like S.H. Raza and F.N. Souza. At Sotheby’s, Raza’s painting Kallisté (1959) sold for $5.6 million on an estimate of $2 million to $3 million, smashing the artist’s previous record of $1.33 million set last March. At Christie’s, Souza’s The Lovers sold for nearly $4.9 million on an estimate of $700,000 to $1 million. The artist’s previous record of just over $4 million was for the 8-foot-wide painting Birth (1955), which also sold at Christie’s in September 2015.

Compared with the amounts typically seen in the Indian art market, “these are not small prices,” Sihare-Sutin said.

Other results were similarly high. At Christie’s, Gulammohammed Shiekh’s Portrait of a Tree (1975) sold for $1.38 million, more than $1 million above its high estimate. Meanwhile, at Sotheby’s, the late Bhupen Khakhar, a participant in the current Venice Biennale, was represented by the painting Hatha Yogi (1978), which sold for $1.8 million, more than double its high estimate. Neither work set a record, but these prices suggest that there is a good amount energy fueling the market for Indian art right now.

That energy is partially the result of efforts to study and acquire South Asian art at institutions such as the Guggenheim Museum, Tate, and the Museum of Modern Art, themselves part of a larger attempt to expand the history of modernism. That’s evident right now in MoMA’s permanent collection galleries, where a work by Indian painter Mohan B. Samant hangs not far from a suite of paintings by Mark Rothko. MoMA acquired the Samant painting in 1963, but prior to the museum’s recent rehang, the piece hadn’t been seen in the permanent galleries since the year after the institution obtained it.

Sotheby’s is among the auction houses seeking to bounce off this institutional momentum. The house’s educational outreach efforts for its clients have included invitation-only guided tours of exhibitions of South Asian artists, like Shahzia Sikander’s show at New York’s Morgan Library in 2021. And in 2023, the year that Paris’s Centre Pompidou mounted a Raza retrospective, Sotheby’s staged a non-selling exhibition focused on the artist at its offices in London.

“No matter where someone entered the building, they could not miss the Raza exhibition,” Sihare-Sutin said. “We had contemporary clients come and look.”

The pieces coming up for sale tend not to be the product of flipping. “It’s 90 to 95 percent privately sourced, fresh-to-market property,” Sihare-Sutin said. “We have to be careful and cognizant of the ecosystem. The galleries are doing great work. We have to be responsible and think about who we want to sell it to.” 

Avari echoed this, saying his clientele is mainly long-term collectors. Like Sihare-Sutin, he said his focus was generally modern art over contemporary art. “We’re still establishing ourselves in the primary market,” he explained. “Unlike other categories, we don’t have that phenomenon of studio to auction block necessarily. These are all works that have been in established collections and traded hands a couple of times.”

(That hasn’t stopped advisers like Kapoor getting more inquiries from non-Indian international collectors about acquiring South Asian works as alternative investment assets. “There’s an opportunity currently to spend a certain amount of money to get a really good art piece, which also has significant upside,” she said.)

According to Sihare-Sutin, there’s a misconception that the market for South Asian modern and contemporary is a regional one. If you follow that logic, much of the interest in South Asian art should come from within South Asia itself. But, she said, this all fails to consider how large and successful the diaspora is in the United States.

“The CEO of every top company is Indian,” she pointed out.

S&P ratings, which are issued to both companies and countries, indicate the degree risk to investors. They range from AAA to D.

The auction house’s revenue has dropped 22 percent on the heels of a new, simplified fee structure that drastically lowered—and standardized—the traditional buyer’s premium, sellers’ fees, and commissions. At the time of the restructured fee announcement, chief executive Charlie Stewart said these are “changes [that] we’ve been contemplating for a long, long time.”

“I think this it’s good to have a fair, and clear, set of terms in the art market. This is kind of a growing-up moment. It’s a step toward maturity for the art world,” Stewart added. Some in the art world, however, considered the restructuring a risky move, since negotiating sellers’ fees is among the most powerful tools in an auction house specialist’s arsenal. For headline-grabbing lots, sellers’ fees are often brought down to zero. 

According to the Wall Street Journal, the price of Sotheby’s bonds has dropped by about 8 percent in the last month, leading to worry among investors that the auction house won’t be able refinance loans that are due in 2026. Prices for bonds due in 2027 have dropped to below 87 cents on the dollar, down from around 93 cents in mid-May.

The auction house’s debt-to-EBITDA ratio, which compares the company’s total debt to its earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization, and is used as a measure of how easily a company can pay off its debt, increased from 7.7 times to 10 times, indicating higher debt relative to earnings.

Despite a cloudy financial outlook, Sotheby’s paid shareholders $8.5 million in dividends in the first quarter of 2024 and a total of $90 million last year.

S&P has a negative outlook on Sotheby’s rating, meaning it could downgrade the rating further if performance doesn’t improve. Sotheby’s is a private company owned by French telecom entrepreneur Patrick Drahi, who bought the house in 2019 for $2.7 billion.

Sotheby’s did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The seven-foot-wide work seems to have significantly declined in value. When Christie’s brought the work to auction in 2022, that house gave it a $30 million estimate; just before the sale, the work was quietly withdrawn. This time, Sotheby’s has awarded the work an approximately $20 million–$25 million estimate.

Any Basquiat coming to auction is deemed an event, largely due to the phenomenally high prices his work typically commands. Although the recent secondary market prices are still high, Basquiats used to more regularly outpace their high estimates by large sums at auction. The dip in prices could be explained by collectors being more thoughtful about how many millions they are willing to spend at auction, and by auction houses adjusting estimates to better fit those new, high interest rate–driven buying habits.

In May, Basquiat’s Untitled (ELMAR), also from 1982, led a modern and contemporary art sale at Philips, selling for $46.5 million. That painting had been estimated to sell for $60 million. The other two Basquiats sold by the house in evening sales that month—Untitled (Portrait of a Famous Ballplayer), from 1981, and Native Carrying Some Guns, Bibles, Amorites on Safari (1982)—headed to auction at lower values, selling for $7.8 million and $12.6 million, respectively. Those figures, which all include buyer’s premium, were squarely within the works’ estimates.

Christie’s and Sotheby’s, too, had Basquiats for sale in May. An untitled 1984 collaboration between Basquiat and Andy Warhol went to Sotheby’s with an estimate of $15 million to $20 million. It sold for $19.3 million. Meanwhile, yet another 1982 work, The Italian Version of Popeye Has no Pork in His Diet, sold at Christie’s for $32 million on an estimate of around $30 million.

Earlier this year, Phillips’s Americas president Jean-Paul Engelen told Puck’s Marion Maneker that Basquiat was “the new Picasso,” a euphemism for the fact that the artist has now achieved legendary status on the market. According to Maneker, roughly $125 million worth of Basquiat’s work sold in May. Look back to the last four years, and that figure crosses the billion-dollar mark.

There’s no question that Basquiat’s market has juice at the moment, a trend that it likely to continue. The only question is whether Sotheby’s priced the work low enough to get collectors interested. Either way, it doesn’t matter much. The work, according to Sotheby’s website, has a guarantee and an irrevocable bid, which means it has effectively already sold. The question, now, is who’s taking it home.

The house is reportedly set to cut around 50 employees based in London, and per the Art Newspaper, similar layoffs may follow in New York and at other Sotheby’s locations in Europe.

A Sotheby’s representative did not immediately respond to request for comment on the Art Newspaper report, which stated that the auction house had entered a “consultation period” in which it would evaluate its financial future.

The report follows two slow but hardly catastrophic auction weeks at Sotheby’s, one held in March in London, the other held in May in New York. Although neither high-profile sale week of contemporary and modern art was a runaway success, the auction house’s leadership said it was pleased with the results.

Last year, Sotheby’s laid off at least 10 senior employees, a cutback that also seemed to coincide with the departure of at least four people involved in NFT-related sales.

Since 2019, Sotheby’s has been held privately by Patrick Drahi. In the past few years, however, there have been rumors of possible financial changes at the auction house, including a potential plan to take Sotheby’s public once again that first made the press in 2021.

Lampley joined Sotheby’s in 2018 after having worked as a specialist at Christie’s where, in 2015, she began leading that house’s Impressionist and Modern Art team in 2012. Over her six years at Sotheby’s Lampley has helped real in marquee worthy consignments and estates, including the Macklowe collection and a rare copy of the U.S. Constitution in 2021 and, much to the chagrin of Christie’s, the Emily Fisher Landau collection in 2023.

When asked about the move Lampley said “after 20 years of auctions, I am excited to experience another side of the art world, and to learn from the very best. My love of art is what drives me, and I am looking forward to getting closer to artists and thinking deeply about the evolution of a body of work.”

Besides overseeing Sotheby’s Contemporary, Modern, Photographs, 20th Century Design, and Prints departments, Lampley was a driving force behind Sotheby’s robust private sales department and invariably has a rolodex full of contacts that will be greatly appreciated and put to good use at Gagosian.

“Brooke is a proven secondary market operator with strong client relationships. She has a drive and entrepreneurial spirit that I think will fit in well at the gallery,” Larry Gagosian told ARTnews.

Lampley is slated to start at Gagosian this fall and will continue to be based in New York.

Sotheby’s CEO Charles Stewart informed the auction house’s staff of Lampley’s planned exit via an email on Wednesday evening, a copy of which was shared with ARTnews. “We are grateful to Brooke for her many contributions to the company over nearly seven years,” the letter read, “…we wish her all the best and look forward to collaborating with her in her next endeavor.”

According to the email, people under Lampley will report to Sebastian Fahey, the global fine art managing director. The Modern & Contemporary Americas team will continue to be led by David Galperin in Contemporary, Courtney Kremers in Private Sales, Julian Dawes in Impressionist and Modern, and Scott Niichel across the middle market Modern and Contemporary categories, the email confirmed.

The 71 works included multiple pieces by Cy Twombly, Ed Ruscha, Andy Warhol, Alberto Giacometti, Roy Lichtenstein, Pablo Picasso, Ellsworth Kelly, Brice Marden, Jasper Johns, Egon Schiele, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Anish Kapoor, Mark Rothko, Francis Bacon, and Jackson Pollock.

The sale of the artworks through Sotheby’s auctions and private sales occurred after the value of shares of Revlon Inc., which his holding company had acquired for $1.74 billion in 1985, fell significantly due to the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on global stock markets. Perelman has been using those as collateral for loans.

While there had been previous reports about Perelman selling off “a large portion of his sprawling 1,000-item art collection,” the recent court filing in a four-year-long insurance court case is the first account released to the public of all the works sold, according to Bloomberg Law, which first reported the news.

Deutsche Bank issued the margin call—a request for additional capital in a brokerage account—that prompted the businessman to sell the 71 artworks and other assets. The financial institution also lent against the billionaire’s art.

At least two of the artworks from Perelman’s collection went to another Top 200 Collector: Ken Griffin. The founder of Citadel and long-time trustee of the Art Institute of Chicago, Griffin purchased Brice Marden’s Letter About Rocks #2 and River 4 for $30 million and $9.5 million after visiting Perelman’s home in the Hamptons in 2020.

A representative for Perelman declined to comment to Bloomberg Law.