A private sale of contemporary paintings is thought to have been one of the largest art deals ever, after two pictures by Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock were bought for a total of $500m (£349m).
Brett Gorvy, chairman and international head of postwar and contemporary art at Christie’s, commented on a report that a major painting by De Kooning and a Jackson Pollock from a west coast collection had been sold for $500m to a mid-west hedge fund manager.
Art Market Monitor reported: “Gorvy tries to restrain himself by not identifying the buyer, but it should be easily understood to be Chicago-based Citadel’s Kenneth Griffin.”
Gorvy said on Instagram that the De Kooning was Interchange, a “seminal masterpiece of abstract expressionism” from 1955. The work originally sold for a record $20.68m – then a record price for a contemporary work sold at auction and a record for a living artist.
According to Gorvy, Interchange was later resold at a significant loss after the 1990 market crash and had been owned by music and film mogul David Geffen. In recent months it had been hanging in the Art Institute of Chicago where it will remain indefinitely.
“If the purchase price reported by Josh Baer is correct, then Interchange once again holds the record for a contemporary art work, only second to 19th-century Paul Gauguin [a work by Gauguin sold privately for $300m last year],” Gorvy wrote.
“Clearly recent reports in the media of an art market slowdown are greatly exaggerated for works that are deemed the best of the best,” he added.
Art Market Monitor also said: “Gorvy doesn’t speculate on which Jackson Pollock work was part of the deal, but David Geffen also owned Number 8, 1950 and Number 17a, 1948.”
Despite 2014 being one of the worst years for hedge funds since the financial crash of 2008, Griffin still made $1.3bn, according to Institutional Investor’s Alpha magazine.
It would not be the first time that Griffin has bought art from Geffen. He and his wife Anne purchased False Start, a 1959 work by Jasper Johns, for $80m in 2006.
Gorvy said in a comment on his Instagram post that the Johns painting would now hang alongside Interchange at the Art Institute of Chicago.
The Griffins gave $19m to the institute in 2006 to help pay for a new 264,000 sq ft modern art wing.
De Kooning was born in the Netherlands in 1904 and went to the US in 1926. He painted in a style that became known as abstract expressionism and was part of the New York School, which included Pollock and Mark Rothko.
This article was amended on 18 February 2016. The original standfirst wrongly suggested Brett Gorvy of Christie’s confirmed the sale figure of $500m.
Resource: http://www.theguardian.com
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