The prestigious art fair, Art Basel, welcomed visitors in Hong Kong. The fair has been halved in size due to travel restriction during the pandemic. But, this didn’t stop its megawatt sales.
A Joan Mitchell painting titled, 12 Hawks at 3 O’Clock (ca. 1962), was offered by Lévy Gorvy gallery, of New York, Palm Beach, Paris, London and Hong Kong in the early hours of the fair. A Private Collector purchased the painting for a price around $20 million. The sale signals the Asian art market’s enduring strength, even as the pandemic rages on.
12 Hawks at 3 O’Clock was one of the star lots offered just three years ago in November 2018, during a blockbuster auction of collector Barney Ebsworth’s estate at Christie’s in New York. There, the painting was expected to fetch between $14 million and $16 million. In a disappointing turn, it ended up hammering below the low estimate, going to an American buyer for a final price of $14.6 million with premium.
The sale marks the highest publicly recorded price for the artist, putting it above Mitchell’s 1969 canvas Blueberry, which sold at auction in May 2018 for $16.6 million and set the artist’s auction record. According to Gorvy, there are Mitchell works that have sold privately for more than $20 million, however.
The market momentum surrounding Mitchell’s art has slowed since 2018. While an upcoming retrospective devoted to the Abstract Expressionist is set to open at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in September, without the spotlight of a New York venue, her market plateau is likely to continue in the West, Gorvy said. But the appetite among buyers for Mitchell’s “strong female voice” is still ripe, particularly in Asia. In countries with few museums with deep Western art holdings, fairs can act as one of the main venues for seeing high-quality works.