Auctions at Dorotheum

The Austrian institution Dorotheum was born in 1707 under the command of Emperor Joseph I. Sotheby’s opened in London in 1744. The first one acquired the prestige of being the most important in Europe due to its 300 years of history, 8 thousand works of art in its rooms and a high number of sales and lots; however, Sotheby’s evolution does not lack any flattering adjectives: under an entrepreneurial spirit it has reached the first places thanks to Samuel Baker, also a publisher and businessman who led the house to have two retail businesses: Sotheby’s Diamonds, Sotheby’s Wine, Sotheby’s Financial Services, among others. Currently, both occupy a privileged place in the ranking of the highest performing institutions in the world accompanied by Christie’s, Phillips, Bonhams and Artcurial. While Dorotheum has the capacity to hold 600 auctions a year, Sotheby’s works in approximately 250, which can be divided into 70 categories such as contemporary art, impressionist and modern art and paintings by old masters to mention a few in private sales.

According to its own figures, July is the most important month for Dorotheum, which has had as many as 31 auctions in that period. Although the figure reached in that year was not revealed, 2017 was the one that yielded the best profits for them: they sold works by Egon Schiele (including a drawing for 2.34 million euros) and Emilio Vedova: Tensione (1959) reached 792,500 euros.

Sotheby’s New Bond Street Gallery for the Sale of Rubens’ Adoration of the Magi, 1959

For its part, Sotheby’s obtained its best sales in 2019 (when it celebrated its 250th anniversary) by generating world records: 4.8 billion dollars, which would position it with the same amount of GDP as countries like Zambia, Ivory Coast or Bangladesh. No more and no less. Monet’s Meules (1890) was sold for 110 million dollars in New York. Sotheby’s diversifies its interests,  which makes it one of the most attractive houses in the media. It has an associated real estate company, Sotheby’s International Real, in which it promotes furniture and objects of daily use. In November 2019 the house auctioned off a Star Wars imperial helmet for 70,000 euros. It was an online auction with nearly 100 objects from the franchise created by George Lucas and now run by Disney.

If Dorotheum’s value resides in its masterpieces, Sotheby’s bets mainly on contemporary art. The first houses treasures with historical and referential value; meanwhile, the second auctions prestigious, contemporary works and possibly focuses on a young audience.

Martin Böhm, director and CEO of Dorotheum, mentions that Lucrezia (1593-1654) by Artemisia Gentileschi was sold for 1.8 million euros. Sotheby’s has sold Edvard Munch’s The Scream (1893) for $119.9 million; Jean-Michel Basquiat’s unnamed piece for $110.5 million; and Andy Warhol’s Double Disaster (1963) for $105.4 million at its New York headquarters.

Not long ago, Dorotheum led a controversy because it allegedly confiscated artwork from Jewish citizens during the Nazi era. Rumor or truth, the news disappeared almost immediately and the information about it is little and contradictory. This was reflected in 2001 when Norbert Grund’s landscapes were removed from the house and returned to the alleged “owners2.

Sotheby’s is not far behind. The English house was the site of the biggest scam in the history of art, when on September 15, 2008 Damien Hirst inflated the price of his works, helped by his allies, to over $200 million. 9 years later, in an article entitled “The False Narrative of Damien Hirst’s Rise and Fall” for The New Yorker Felix Salmon wrote about it, “He got rich, his galleries got rich, his collectors got rich, everybody was happy. But, then, in 2008, he got a bit too cocky when he auctioned off two hundred million dollars’ worth of art, fresh from his studio, at Sotheby’s, bypassing dealers entirely. That auction marked the end of Hirst as an art-market darling: his auction volumes and prices dropped, and bitter collectors who had spent millions on his art were left with work worth much less than what they had paid for it”. Two years ago Sotheby’s was perhaps the most talked about auction on social networks when a painting by Banksy triggered its own destruction when it was sold. With this transgressive action, the auction house became a space where a small and ephemeral work of art was created.

1

GIRL WITH BALLOON BY BANKSY (2018)

What would you think if you acquired a painting and a second later it is self-destroyed? Shortly after being sold in €1.2 million in Sotheby’s, one of Banksy’s most iconic spray artworks turned into strips while the painting began to pass through a shredder which was installed on the frame by the artist himself. What for some people was a radical prank, for some others was the most critical gesture the street artist could have against the dynamics of capitalism inside the art market. But while trying to play with the multimillionaire auction rules, Banksy wasn’t succeed in being critical as the value of the work increased once the painting was destroyed. In a way, Girl with Balloon turned into a totally different piece once the original one disappeared.

1. CRAZY (2019)

Monotype with collage, engraving and reliefs
on hand-painted Twinrocker paper
127 ×165 cm.

Crazy, Loony and Psycho are some of the words of Crazy (2019), made based on monotype and collage, intervened with engraving and reliefs. Bochner showed his work for the first time at the New York School of Visual Arts; due to the lack of funds, they had to be shown photocopies to the spectators. In his work there is a great challenge: reading and looking at the painting at the same time. His father was a painter of advertising signs, hence his interest in experimenting with words.

2. SILENCE (2019)

Monotype with collage, engraving and reliefs on
hand-painted Twinrocker paper
81 × 52 cm

For Bochner the painting must say something transcendent, otherwise it is not worth listening to. When looking in our environment we find words and texts that illuminate walls, spaces and cities. Mel says “Silence” in a monotype with collage, engraving and relief on Twinrokcer hand-painted paper to face adversities from another point of view. After preparing to be a painter, Bochner decided to explore other techniques. However, he considers himself a painter who does not paint. His purpose in art is to be direct, wrap the message or reveal it.

3. BABBLE (2019)

Monotype with collage, engraving and reliefs
on hand-painted Twinrocker paper
160 × 120 cm

A characteristic of Bochner’s work is his ability to seduce through verbal information. The pictorial, the color, the plane and the surface are secondary elements when compared to the linguistic universe that it uses. From 1965 he omitted his participation in the world of painting and it was up to a decade after he recovered it; now color is their main ally. Bochner has used his work tool as a means of expressing his feelings and questioning the functionality of art and the world in which he finds himself. Such is the case of works in which he takes up cards and small papers to write sentences of this type.

4. BOZO (2019)

Monotype with collage, engraving and reliefs
on hand-painted Twinrocker paper
109 × 119 cm

The American artist points out the difference between reading something and seeing something, because different parts of the brain are used for each activity. When interpreting their works, viewers observe colors, surfaces; linguistic meanings are not at first sight. In a second moment, however, the observer discovers that color is an obstacle to deciphering the meaning of the words. This playful relationship between the work and the viewer is an attempt to confuse the audience: it seems to question our own process to appreciate art.

5. CHUCKLE (2016)

Monotype with collage, engraving and reliefs
on hand-painted Twinrocker paper
45 × 76 cm

When looking at a Bochner painting we find words and synonyms, but the meaning of these changes as you look at them. The artist thought about the semantic walk that his work would have when it was exhibited and, for this reason, there is an emotional exercise for the person who watches them carefully. The words he places in his works do not mean the same for everyone who looks at it, there are always different interpretations. For him, his words cannot be considered poetry, but he does perceive them as rigorous forms of language.

6. TOP DOG (2019)

Monotype with collage, engraving and reliefs
on hand-painted Twinrocker paper
160 × 90 cm

Bochner has been in charge of exploring the usefulness of language and communication between receivers and emitters. It reminds us that the observer often attributes character and meaning to things that are sometimes inanimate objects. Language is not transparent is the term that began to be used in 1969 to describe works with a title on paper.

7. ERADICATE (2019)

Monotype with collage, engraving and reliefs
on hand-painted Twinrocker paper
81 × 52 cm

Bochner’s works have been rated as complicated. The text is the central source of the work and the artist seeks to send a message on topics related to language. Bochner writes, exhibits, and we read. We follow his words until we find a possible meaning. His
interest in language revived when he saw the new edition of the thesaurus. From this moment on, he remembered the years that have passed and his perception of ordinary language changed.

8. BLAH, BLAH, BLAH (2019)

Monotype with collage, engraving and reliefs
on hand-painted Twinrocker paper
125 × 183 cm

The artist has been acclaimed for his paintings Blah, Blah, Blah (2019) and HA, HA, HA (2019). His first experiment with these words was in 2008 when he thought that if “the black hole of language” existed, then “Blah Blah Blah” had the possibility of being anything when used in conversation. This expression denotes intimacy and abbreviation. And it is used to display a phrase that may be meaningless (or just the opposite). Bochner mentions, “We live in a world that is overcrowded with empty language: small conversations, tweets, texts, leet speak, chit-chat, pop-up ads, telephone answer messages (‘your call is important to us …’) , warnings on medicine bottles (‘if you have an erection that lasts more than four hours …’). If this linguistic tsunami cannot be escaped, the paintings of ‘Bla, Bla, Bla’ subvert it from below. ”

10. FOOL (2019)

Monotype with collage, engraving and reliefs
on hand-painted Twinrocker paper
127 × 167 cm

The American creator is interested in seeing what his work causes to others instead of looking at the direct interpretation of it. As his work transforms over the years, he wants to be more and more inside his works and just that is the result he wants for many: to lose himself inside them. In an interview with ArtDependence he mentions, “What I’m trying to do is make the painting physical and complex enough to lose intellectual control. Getting into painting is not the problem, it’s how to get out of it.”

9. HA, HA, HA (2019)

Monotype with collage, engraving and reliefs
on hand-painted Twinrocker paper
51 × 57 cm

Interested in inverting in Mel Bochner’s artworks?
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