{"id":6454,"date":"2025-05-12T18:29:05","date_gmt":"2025-05-12T18:29:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/2025\/05\/12\/observer-arts-interviews-christies-isabella-lauria\/"},"modified":"2025-05-12T18:29:08","modified_gmt":"2025-05-12T18:29:08","slug":"observer-arts-interviews-christies-isabella-lauria","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/2025\/05\/12\/observer-arts-interviews-christies-isabella-lauria\/","title":{"rendered":"Observer Arts Interviews: Christie\u2019s Isabella Lauria"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Isabella Lauria. CHRISTIE\u2019S IMAGES LTD. 2025<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

It\u2019s the week of the big spring auctions in New York<\/a>, and art collectors with a little left over in their pockets from the fair weekend now turn their attention to the big three houses. Last May Christie’s<\/a>, Sotheby\u2019s and Phillips sold $1.4 billion during this season<\/a>, a 22 percent decrease from 2023. Will we see a return to form this week? Christie\u2019s has assembled a slate of expensive works, led by Jean-Michel Basquiat<\/a>\u2019s Baby Boom<\/i> (1982), for its marquee 21st Century Evening Sale<\/a> on Wednesday. We caught up with Isabella Lauria<\/a>, the head of that sale, to hear more about Baby Boom <\/i>and some of the other works heading to the block that evening.<\/p>\n

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Basquiat\u2019s output was wild and varied. What can you tell me about <\/b>Baby Boom<\/i><\/b>? What makes it special? 1982 would have been fairly early in his career, right?<\/b><\/p>\n

Baby Boom<\/i> was painted in 1982 and included in Basquiat\u2019s renowned solo show with Fun Gallery in November of 1982. Considered by many to be the most important show of the artist\u2019s life, it revealed a young Basquiat at age 22 with great artistic freedom beginning to pay tribute to the graffiti community. It was also where he showcased his first stretcher-bar paintings (with handmade supports), this work standing among them. Baby Boom<\/i> has been interpreted as Basquiat\u2019s family portrait. With a title in reference to the influx in birthrate following WWII, it is a triple portrait thought to portray Basquiat\u2019s father (Gerard) at center, his mother (Matilda) to the right, and the young artist at left. It is, therefore, incredibly personal, and it is a rarity to see something so autobiographical in his oeuvre. The work has been exhibited in no less than twenty monographic shows of Basquiat\u2019s career, across a dozen countries and four continents, with posthumous retrospectives including the Brooklyn Museum in 2005, Fondation Beyeler in 2010, Gagosian in 2013 and Fondation Louis Vuitton in 2019.<\/p>\n

I was at the 2017 auction where a painting by Basquiat sold for $110.5 million, to audible gasps. How has the Basquiat market changed since then?\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n

Since 2017, Basquiat\u2019s relevance to Contemporary culture has continued to spread, far beyond the world of fine art, into music, media and fashion. In the seven years since the above record price was achieved, he has had several major institutional retrospectives which have continued to assert his importance in the art historical canon, including \u201cKing Pleasure\u201d in both New York and Los Angeles in 2024, two shows at Fondation Louis Vuitton (\u201cJean-Michel Basquiat\u201d in 2018-2019 and \u201cBasquiat x Warhol: Painting Four Hands\u201d in 2023), and a further retrospective at the Brant Foundation in New York, in which this work was included.<\/p>\n

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Jean-Michel Basquiat\u2019s Baby Boom (1982) has a high estimate of $30,000,000. CHRISTIE\u2019S IMAGES LTD. 2025<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Why is the Basquiat in the 21st Century Sale despite having been made in the 20th century? It strikes me as a tactical decision.<\/b><\/p>\n

Christie\u2019s 21st Century Evening Sale presents masterworks from the past 50 years of art history, in order to chart the landscape of today\u2019s artistic culture. Celebrated blue-chip artists from the late 20th Century bring context to the emerging creators of the 21st Century, and in turn are given new life. Basquiat is a keystone of this strategy, being a late 20th-century artist who pre-cursored almost every major artistic movement we see thriving today.<\/p>\n

Your sale also features a subsection with <\/b>objects chosen by Tiqui Atencio and Ago Demirdjian<\/b><\/a>. Can you tell us more about this group of work?\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n

The first sixteen works of the 21st Century Evening Sale, plus a grouping of around forty in the Post-War and Contemporary Day Sale, are coming from renowned collector, patron and author, Tiqui Atencio<\/a>, and her husband, Ago Demirdjian<\/a>. Tiqui\u2019s collecting philosophy is encapsulated by a term she coined, \u201c<\/b>traveloguing,\u201d <\/b>whereby she links art with a particular time and place, not only to mark a moment in the couple\u2019s lives, but also as a way of helping them understand a people and their history. As such, the collection highlights reflect their lives spent in Latin America (Herrera, Clark, Gego), New York (Hodges, Horn, Mehretu, Ruscha) and London (Brown, Hirst), all of which she collected in depth, and with extraordinary timing, acquiring top examples very early. Tiqui\u2019s highly refined eye has resulted in her becoming a sought-after advisor to museums around the world, and together she and Ago have served on influential committees such as the International Council of the Tate Gallery in London (where she founded the Latin American Acquisitions Fund), the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Mus\u00e9e d\u2019Art Moderne de Paris and the Nouveau Mus\u00e9e National de Monaco. Tiqui\u2019s passion to communicate the joy she found in art has also led to her authoring several critically acclaimed books including Could Have, Would Have, Should Have<\/i> (Art\/Books, 2016), which is a series of interviews with collectors, For Art\u2019s Sake: Inside the Homes of Art Dealers <\/i>(Rizzoli, 2020), and Inside the Homes of Artists: For Art\u2019s Sake <\/i>(Rizzoli, 2024).<\/p>\n

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Carmen Herrera\u2019s Horizontal (1965) has a high estimate of $1,200,000. CHRISTIE\u2019S IMAGES LTD. 2025<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n

One of the works they selected was by the late, great Carmen Herrera<\/a>. Could you tell me a little about that artwork and why it might appeal to an auction buyer?<\/b><\/p>\n

Carmen Herrera was a proponent of \u2018pure\u2019 or geometric abstraction, presenting a transatlantic dialogue within the international history of 20th-century abstraction, one that spans European Constructivism and Neoplasticism to Brazilian and Cuban Concrete art, Argentinian Madi and New York Color Field and Hard-Edge painting.\u200bThis 1965 painting, Horizontal,<\/i> is an important example; it encapsulates Herrera\u2019s mature style, consisting of crisp lines and contrasting chromatic planes, creating an infinite variety of movement, rhythm and spatial tension.\u200bHorizontal<\/i> belongs to a rare series of circular or tondo paintings executed in 1965, a format Herrera had briefly explored in the 1950s, but which she returned to in the mid-1960s with stunning chromatic effects. The present example is distinguished for its contrasting diamond shape contained within a circle and pierced horizontally along the central axis with a band of color that suggests a beam of light radiating outward.\u200bThe companion work to this, Rondo (Blue and Yellow)<\/i> (1965), is held in the collection of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C.\u200b Works from the mid-1960s are the most sought after as they reflect the full maturation of the artist\u2019s unique approach to hard-edge or geometric abstraction.\u200b Horizontal<\/i> was notably included in a career retrospective of Herrera at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2016, a show which solidified her position in the history of 20th-century abstraction.<\/p>\n

Your work by Simone Leigh<\/a> may set a record for the artist. Does that lend a sense of excitement to potential collectors? Is it easier to pay a great deal when you know you own the most expensive one?\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n

What excites collectors the most is exceptional quality. Buyers want something that is best in class, which is absolutely what Sentinel IV<\/i> is. It is one of the most celebrated forms in Leigh\u2019s oeuvre, with examples currently on display in MoMA and the National Gallery.<\/p>\n

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Marlene Dumas\u2019 Miss January has a high estimate of $18,000,000. CHRISTIE\u2019S IMAGES LTD. 2025<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I know one late-minute addition to the line-up is Marlene Dumas<\/a>\u2019 <\/b>Miss January<\/i><\/b> (1997). There\u2019s a high estimate on that one. What makes it so special?<\/b><\/p>\n

Miss January<\/i>\u2019s monumental scale and iconic subject matter establish the work as Dumas\u2019 magnum opus. It triumphantly masters the female form while defiantly reclaiming the female nude from its male-centric history. Dumas\u2019 very first known drawing, executed at age 10, was called Miss World<\/i>. It showed ten idealized forms of glamour models, demonstrating her lifelong fascination with the female form under scrutiny. She returned to the subject in Miss January<\/i> over thirty years later for perhaps her most ambitious work. Paintings by Dumas are already rare at auction. However, one of this quality has never come to market. There is a third-party guarantee in place, meaning the work is already selling at the artist\u2019s new auction record. It will also be the highest price ever paid for a living female artist at auction.<\/p>\n

Finally, the easiest question: The annual UBS\/Art Basel market report saw public and private sales fall 20 percent last year. How do you feel about the art market?\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n

While the overall volume of supply has dropped, the quality of art coming through is still exceptional, and clients are willing to compete for those top examples. Our sale-through rates and our performance against estimates have remained steady in recent years, indicating that demand is still very strong.<\/p>\n

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