More on Gagosian

The NY Magazine has a good article on art "superdealer" Larry Gagosian.  Much of the information is already known and has been reported in the press.  The article looks at Gagosian through his relations ship with the Mugrabis art dealers.

The NY Magazine reports

Gagosian and the Mugrabis weren’t so much looking for a bargain as they were intent on protecting the value of the other Warhols they own. The Mugrabis, Colombian Jews by way of Trump Tower—where the family patriarch, Jose, and his wife raised the boys—possess more than 800 Warhol artworks (in addition to at least 100 works each by Damien Hirst and Jean-Michel Basquiat and numerous large pieces by Jeff Koons and Richard Prince). They didn’t want to see anything “bought in” by the auction house—which is what occurs when bidding doesn’t reach the reserve price the auction house had privately set for a piece, the artwork being returned to the seller. If that happens, says Richard Polsky, a private dealer in California and the author of the books I Bought Andy Warhol and I Sold Andy Warhol—Too Soon, the public reads that “three Warhols failed to sell last night,” and it can trigger some kind of panic: “Maybe prices for Warhol begin to slowly drop, maybe there’s a sell-off.” The effect on the Mugrabis’ or Gagosian’s collection would be like what happens to a hedge fund with a composition overweighted to a given commodity when that commodity’s price goes into a sudden free fall. There might be a ripple effect. Sarah Thornton, a writer for The Economist, has described the Warhol market as a bellwether for the entire contemporary-art market. And the prices for Warhols, as for most of the artists that Gagosian has handled, are set at auction. Which means Gagosian tries to manage what goes on there as closely as possible.

While auction houses are forbidden from explicitly sharing certain details prior to the sale of a lot, such as the reserve price, a good deal of information gets signaled to a favored collector—particularly if interests align. This was certainly the case for Gagosian and Mugrabi, who were told by Sotheby’s not to worry about the most valuable of Froehlich’s three Warhols, Mrs. McCarthy and Mrs. Brown (Tunafish Disaster), a 1963 painting—of two suburban housewives whose deaths from food poisoning had briefly been the subject of tabloid notoriety—with an estimate of £3.5 million to £4.5 million. Sotheby’s already had interest in it, Mugrabi told Gagosian: “The Tunafish Disaster is pretty covered. That’s going to sell.”

As for Froehlich’s two remaining Warhols, they were late-career works. One, a large Hammer and Sickle painting, had been produced in 1976 and was estimated at £2 million to £3 million. The other, a glittering silvery image of women’s pumps titled Diamond Dust Shoes, was made in 1980 and carried an estimate of £600,000 to £800,000. “Do you like the shoe painting or not really?” Mugrabi asked Gagosian. “I’m gonna try to buy it cheap if I can.” Gagosian was apparently interested. “Okay, we’ll always give you an option,” Mugrabi assured him, and also ran through some of the other lots. He suggested Gagosian bid on an Andreas Gursky photograph of Dubai (“the blue one”) that he thought was unlikely to sell above its estimated price range—“especially if you want to try to lure this guy in.” Gagosian was eager to represent Gursky, and has since signed him. But two Alexander Calder mobiles, a large Jean-Michel Basquiat work painted in the year of his death, and “the European art—like the [Lucio] Fontana and the Yves Klein, all that stuff”—would probably do well without their help, Mugrabi said. “I hate that Basquiat, you?” he added. “I like the ones we got so much better than that.”

Source: The New York Magazine