Christie's Pulled 10 Lots in Latin American Art Sale

Fellow appraiser, Monica Fidel, ISA CAPP sent me an interesting article which posted online today to the Art Newspaper.  The article notes that 10 lots were pulled from the recent Latin American art sale at Christie's in New York City.  The article states "the works, allegedly by artists including Ivan Serpa, Mira Schendel, Roberto Burle Marx, Ione Saldanha, Hércules Barsotti, Ubi Bava and Amílcar de Castro, were “withdrawn pending additional research”, says a spokeswoman for the auction house."

All of the works can from the same collection in Rio de Janeiro.  Provenance is sketchy at the moment.  It appears Christie's checked with several experts who expressed they had doubts and concerns.

Keep in mind, Brazil is part of the BRIC nations (Brazil, Russia, India and China) which have seen enormous economic growth as well as an interest in national art.  With that, usually comes fakes and those looking to take advantage.

The Art Newspaper reports

All of the works came from the Rio de Janeiro-based Ralph Santos Oliveira collection. The collector told the Brazilian newspaper Folha de S.Paulo that he was “shocked” by the removal of the pieces. He said he had tried to place them at auction on behalf of the owner, his grandmother, who suffers from Alzheimer’s disease and cannot recall where the works were bought.

A spokeswoman for Christie’s said that these were “rare circumstances” and that there are “occurrences when information comes to light after publication [of the catalogue] that was previously unavailable”.

Members of the Brazilian art trade say they had doubts about the works. André Millan, the owner of the São Paulo-based gallery Millan, which represented Schendel’s estate for a decade until 2012, says he had concerns about a picture Christie’s sent him by email of a work purported to be by Schendel. The work (Untitled, 1964, tempera on burlap mounted on wood, est $35,000-$45,000) was later withdrawn.

Gustavo Rebello, a Rio-based dealer and collector of works by Ivan Serpa, says that he had a similar impression regarding the works by Serpa, which he saw for the first time in the catalogue. “They seemed very suspicious, clearly strange,” Rebello says. “They also seemed too flat and plain to be Serpa paintings, especially the smaller ones.”

A week after the removal of the works at Christie’s, Phillips also removed a work by Alfredo Volpi from its Latin American art sale, scheduled for 23 May. Representatives of the artist’s estate alerted the auction house about the work on paper, which was dated 1970 and estimated to sell for $20,000, because they thought it was “suspicious”, says Marco Antonio Mastrobuono, the head of the Instituto Alfredo Volpi. “Works on paper were made by Volpi in the early 1960s, but never on a sheet with a letterhead like the one shown. This probably belongs to the same series of fakes on paper that surfaced around 2005.”

Source: The Art Newspaper