Auction: Photographs, April 5, 2013 @Christie's New York

Christie's various owner Photographs sale later this week gathers a wide variety of periods and styles into a dense package. There aren't too many surprises to be found here, just plenty of solid work worth a look. Overall, there are a total of 204 lots of photography available in the sale, with a total High estimate of $6512000.

Here's the statistical breakdown:

Total Low Lots (high estimate up to and including $10000): 43
Total Low Estimate (sum of high estimates of Low lots): $333000

Total Mid Lots (high estimate between $10000 and $50000): 140
Total Mid Estimate: $3169000

Total High Lots (high estimate above $50000): 21
Total High Estimate: $3010000

The top photography lot by High estimate is lot 251, Robert Frank, Trolley-New Orleans, 1955, estimated at $400000-600000 (image at right, top, via Christie's.)

Here's the complete list of photographers represented by five or more lots in the sale (with the number of lots in parentheses):

Ansel Adams (21) Irving Penn (16) Edward Weston (10) Henri Cartier-Bresson (8) William Eggleston (8) Hiroshi Sugimoto (8) Harry Callahan (6) Eugene Smith (6) Diane Arbus (5) Brassai (5) Robert Frank (5) Jacques-Henri Lartigue (5)

Other photographs of interest include lot 228, William Eggleston, Greenwood, Mississippi, 1973/1976, estimated at $150000-250000 (image at right, middle, via Christie's) and lot 165, Edward Weston, Mexico (Tina on the Azotea), 1924, estimated at $100000-150000 (image at right, bottom, via Christie's).

The complete lot by lot catalog can be found here.

Photographs
April 5th

Christie's
20 Rockefeller Plaza
New York, NY 10020

At War with the Obvious: Photographs by William Eggleston @Met

JTF (just the facts): A total of 36 color photographs, framed in brown wood and matted, and hung in a series of three small rooms on the second floor of the museum. All of the works are dye transfer prints, taken between 1969 and 1984; most are vintage prints. Physical sizes range from 12x17 to 15x22 or reverse; no edition information was available. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: This exhibit is an example of the entirely natural desire of a museum to show off its new acquisitions. Last year, the Met acquired a high quality selection of early Egglestons (a complete set from his first portfolio, a group of 15 images from William Eggleston's Guide, and a handful of other iconic pictures) and this show gets them up on the walls with little delay. There isn't really any scholarly framework or new thinking here, just an impressive sample of Eggleston's early dye transfers.

While it's hard to beat the tricycle, the red ceiling, the peaches sign, or the green shower stall, I was most interested to see Eggleston's first portfolio from 1974. While the used tires sign, the plastic animals, and the rusted truck in the afternoon sun were familiar to me, the others from the group were more obscure and therefore more intriguing as potential evidence of things to come in his future artistic life. Angles and geometries dominate a claustrophobic brick wall parking space and are also found in the distorted sideways perspective of an office curtain seen through the front window. Decay is never far from view, whether it be the red bars of a swingset poking out of overgrown greenery or a rusted metal target suspended from scraggly treetops. And the quirks of vernacular Southern America are also ever present: a painted dog statue on a stepped pedestal, decorative lights on the roofline of a snack shack, or the plastic flowers that adorn a Faith sign. In a many ways, these first images provide a surprisingly useful framework for what would come later.

I would certainly be remiss if I failed to touch on the rich, saturated color in these dye transfers. Even in the most mundane compositions, Eggleston's masterful command of everyday color is repeatedly demonstrated, coming through again and again with tactile lushness. While most collectors and photography enthusiasts will be familiar with much of what is on view here, that in no way diminishes the enjoyment that comes from a few lazy minutes reveling in the wonders of this color. The orange airplane, the yellow curb, the green dress, the red room, the golden piano, we've seen them before, but they never get old.

 

Collector's POV: Since this is a museum show, there are obviously no posted prices for the works on display. Eggleston's work is routinely available in the secondary markets, with lesser known images and iconic works coming up for sale with surprising regularity. Recent prices for single images have roughly ranged from a reasonable $5000 to the blockbuster $578500, a record achieved last year by one of the new (and somewhat controversial) extra large digital prints. Eggleston is represented by Cheim & Read in New York (here).

 

Rating: ** (two stars) VERY GOOD (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:

• Eggleston Trust site (here)
• Features/Reviews: Wall Street Journal (here)

 

At War with the Obvious: Photographs by William Eggleston

Through July 28th

 

Metropolitan Museum of Art

1000 Fifth Avenue

New York, NY 10028

Auction Results: Photographic Masterworks by William Eggleston Sold to Benefit the Eggleston Artistic Trust, March 12, 2012 @Christie's

As expected, the results of the Eggleston sale last night at Christie's were tremendously positive. It was a white glove sale (all the lots found buyers), and the Total Sale Proceeds topped the high end of the estimate range by more than $2.5M.

The summary statistics are below (all results include the buyer’s premium):

Total Lots: 36
Pre Sale Low Total Estimate: $2230000
Pre Sale High Total Estimate: $3350000
Total Lots Sold: 36
Total Lots Bought In: 0
Buy In %: 0.00%
Total Sale Proceeds: $5903250

Here is the breakdown (using the Low, Mid, and High definitions from the preview post, here):

Low Total Lots: 0
Low Sold: NA
Low Bought In: NA
Buy In %: NA
Total Low Estimate: NA
Total Low Sold: NA

Mid Total Lots: 7
Mid Sold: 7
Mid Bought In: 0
Buy In %: 0.00%
Total Mid Estimate: $350000
Total Mid Sold: $367750

High Total Lots: 29
High Sold: 29
High Bought In: 0
Buy In %: 0.00%
Total High Estimate: $3000000
Total High Sold: $5535500

The top photography lot by High estimate was lot 24, William Eggleston, Untitled, 1970, at $200000-300000. (This is the tricycle.) It was also the top outcome of the sale at $578500, apparently a new record for a single Eggleston image.

97.22% of the lots that sold had proceeds in or above the estimate range. There were 6 lots that had proceeds of at least double the high estimate, and 2 more which had proceeds of at least triple the high estimate (the drink on the airplane tray table and the blue convertible on the cover of the catalogue).

Complete lot by lot results can be found here.

Christie's
20 Rockefeller Plaza
New York, NY 10020

Auction: Photographic Masterworks by William Eggleston Sold to Benefit the Eggleston Artistic Trust, March 12, 2012 @Christie's

Regular readers here will know that starting last summer I moved away from comprehensive reporting on worldwide photography and contemporary art auctions to spend more time on reviews of gallery and museum shows. Just because I wasn't analyzing the sales doesn't mean that I wasn't following them as closely or actively as ever; I just concluded that I needed to focus my available writing time on the reviews. This decision wasn't ever meant to be a hard and fast one, and today, I'll be jumping back into the auction fray to talk about the Eggleston sale later tonight, and I'll follow up later this week to report on the results.

The reason this particular sale caught my attention is that I think it represents some topics worth talking about further. For those unfamiliar with what is going on here, this sale is an offering of extra large, recently made pigment prints (44x60 or reverse, in editions of 2), never before available in the market. Overall, there are a total of 36 lots available, with a total High estimate of $3350000. So not only do we have a process that Eggleston has never used before, we have an unprecedented use of scale, applied to a selection of images, both greatest hits and lesser known works. In addition, Eggleston is using the Damien Hirst model of direct to the collector via an auction house, bypassing the normal gallery route for new work.

My first reaction to both the idea of extra large, poster sized modern prints, as well as to the distribution model was one of extreme skepticism. Having not seen the prints, it seemed like a cashing-in, making big prints for the sake of being big and selling them for big prices to big collectors. While I certainly don't begrudge artists for finding creative ways for making money, the premise here seemed a bit commercial I must say. But I withheld judgment until I could go and see the prints for myself, which I did last week during the preview. (Installation shots from the preview at right.)

Aside from a couple of prints which suffer from over enlargement graininess and fuzziness in certain spots, I was surprised to find that the prints are pretty terrific, in some cases downright spectacular. The colors are saturated and vibrant, with a thick, richness that I wasn't expecting. While the tricycle, the red ceiling, the green shower, and the peaches sign are, of course, all here, the really smart and unexpected aspect of these particular prints is that Eggleston seems to have thought carefully about which lesser known images would benefit most from increased scale. I'd say roughly half of the works for sale use this scale change for maximum effect. The low angle, worm's eye views are especially strong, as are the top down views of car hoods and trunks. The shiny brass doorknob is something altogether different in this larger size. And a huge front tire, with Eggleston himself reflected in the silvery chrome of the bumper, was my favorite of the non-obvious choices.

So my revised conclusion is that while I'm still wary of the feeling of a sell-out, I expect these well-made prints are going to do very well indeed, with some of the iconic images running up much higher than the estimates might foretell.

Here's the simple statistical breakdown:

Total Low Lots (high estimate up to and including $10000): 0
Total Low Estimate (sum of high estimates of Low lots): NA

Total Mid Lots (high estimate between $10000 and $50000): 7
Total Mid Estimate: $350000

Total High Lots (high estimate above $50000): 29
Total High Estimate: $3000000

The top photography lot by High estimate is lot 24, William Eggleston, Untitled, 1970, at $200000-300000. (This is the tricycle.)

The complete lot by lot catalog can be found here. The eCatalogue is here.

Photographic Masterworks by William Eggleston Sold to Benefit the Eggleston Artistic Trust
March 12th

Christie's
20 Rockefeller Plaza
New York, NY 10020

Auction: Photographs, April 8, 2011 @Christie's

Christie's finishes up its spring Photographs run with a various owner sale on Friday. I can't imagine there are too many vintage Eggleston tricycles still in private hands, so I'm sure the bidding for this icon of color photography will be fierce. I also assume the Frank spiral-bound Peru signed to Alexy Brodovitch with a MoMA provenance is a one of a kind treasure and will bring some serious Frank collectors out of the woodwork. With Penn images interspersed throughout the sale, there are a total of 211 photographs on offer, with a total High estimate of $5046000.

Here's the statistical breakdown:

Total Low Lots (high estimate up to and including $10000): 93
Total Low Estimate (sum of high estimates of Low lots): $570000

Total Mid Lots (high estimate between $10000 and $50000): 101

Total Mid Estimate: $2346000

Total High Lots (high estimate above $50000): 17
Total High Estimate: $2130000

The top lot by High estimate is lot 561, Irving Penn, Cuzco Children, 1948/1977, at $250000-350000.

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Here's the complete list of photographers represented by five or more lots in the sale (with the number of lots in parentheses):

Irving Penn (19)

Bruce Weber (18)
Robert Mapplethorpe (10)
William Eggleston (9)
Ansel Adams (7)
Richard Avedon (6)
Harry Callahan (6)
Henri Cartier-Bresson (6)
Robert Frank (6)
Andre Kertesz (6)
Bernd and Hilla Becher (5)
Sally Mann (5)
Erwin Olaf (5)
Herb Ritts (5)

(Lot 452, Robert Frank, Peru, 1948, at $100000-150000, at right, middle, lot 480, William Eggleston, Memphis (Tricycle), 1969-70, at $200000-300000, at right, top, and lot 491, Maurice Tabard, Montage (Nue), 1929, at $15000-25000, at right, bottom, all via Christie's.)
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The complete lot by lot catalog can be found here. The eCatalogue is located here.

Photographs

April 8th

Christie's

20 Rockefeller Plaza

New York, NY 10020

Film: William Eggleston in the Real World

JTF (just the facts): Released in 2005 by Palm Pictures (here). 87 minutes. Directed by Michael Almereyda. (DVD cover shot at right, via Amazon.)

Comments/Context: If you like your documentary biographies to be thorough and orderly, covering the span of the subject's life chronologically from beginning to end, with a deeper focus on the important highlights from the person's history, drawing conclusions about his/her larger influence in the world around us, then you will likely find this film highly unsatisfying. For the most part, this biopic is a series of reality vignettes, shot on hand held video: casual conversations, working photography trips, car rides, piano playing, downtime with family and friends, exhibition visits, and quiet walking. It gets into Eggleston's personal space and follows him around, silently tracking him as he works, watching as his eccentricities come forward. In the end, Eggleston remains stubbornly elusive, but the movie does a terrific job of capturing fragments of the fabric of his life.

I enjoyed most the segments of Eggleston actually shooting. There are many scenes where he is wandering, looking at unspectacular shop fronts or store windows, intermittently taking one or two pictures and then moving on. He stares at the giant rooster on top of a restaurant, a sideways pinata resting on a refrigerated case in a convenience store, and a cardboard man in a dinner jacket stuck against a deep green wall. Often, he is just walking and looking, both during the day and at night, with his parka hood over his head, his son Winston following at a distance to aid with a camera or a tripod. On the way back to Memphis, they stop to look at an abandoned house for sale along the roadside. It has a geometric green roof (that happens to be falling in), a spray painted sign, and amazing soft light and shadows in the empty interior rooms. By watching Eggleston move around and select his pictures, you can begin to see how his brain works, how his eye is drawn to certain compositions and color effects.

I also liked the sequence of Eggleston visiting his show at the Getty, riding the tram, taking pictures of the buildings like any other tourist, and wandering among the images on display, apparently without anyone recognizing who he was. The film claims he has made over 250000 photographs to date in his life, and he makes the comment that he liked the selection of pictures the curators had chosen. This seems to be emblematic of his reluctant approach to the art world; he hadn't obsessively controlled the exhibition, but rather he seemed like an outsider, viewing the work as something pleasant, but entirely foreign. In other parts of the film, he makes the shortest possible acceptance speech for a lifetime achievement award, and refuses to engage in a discourse that the director wants to have about the underlying theoretical aspects of his work. He dismisses these issues as patently wrong and misguided, and not at all how he approaches his art; he seems to have no interest in putting his aesthetics into words, or thinks trying to do so is an impossible and generally stupid idea.

The film also does an excellent job of showing how varied Eggleston's artistic pursuits really are. He plays a synthesized organ and a regular piano, composing his own symphonies (played loud), and he draws intensely with pastels and colored pencils. Between moments of normal human ordinariness, with a heavy dose of drinking and smoking, he seems to be constantly creating, editing, looking and processing, generally only intermittently aware of the chaos or silence around him.

Overall, I think the film does a solid job of creating an eclectic yet somehow rounded picture of Eggleston as a fascinating, contradictory mix: talented, vulnerable, charming, eccentric, and stubborn. For those who want an unvarnished, unfinished view of the artist rather than a heroic historicized timeline, this documentary will be well worth putting in your Netflix queue.

Transit Hub:

• Eggleston Trust (here)
• Movie reviews: SF Chronicle (here), LA Times (here), Boston Globe (here)

Pioneers of Color @Houk

JTF (just the facts): A group show of a total of 48 color works from three different photographers (William Eggleston, Joel Meyerowitz, and Stephen Shore), all framed in white and matted, and hung in the entry, the main gallery space, and the smaller back gallery. The exhibit coincides with the publication of Starburst: Color Photography in America 1970-1980 by Hatje Cantz (here) and a larger survey at the Cincinnati Art Museum. (Installation shots at right.)

Details on the included works are as follows, with the number of images on display in parentheses:

• Stephen Shore (20): Most of the works on view are vintage chromogenic contact prints, made between 1973 and 1979. Nearly all of these prints are 8x10 or reverse (there is one that is 12x15). A few larger c-prints (20x24) have also been included, as well as a pigment print on rag paper of one of Shore's journal pages (18x14).
• Joel Meyerowitz (20): The vintage works on display are either 20x24 dye transfers or smaller 8x10 RC prints. Recent pigment prints from the older negatives have been made in three sizes 20x24, 30x40, and 48x60, in editions of 15 or 20, 10, and 5 respectively. All of the images were taken between 1963 and 1983.
• William Eggleston (8): Most of the works on display are 16x20 dye transfers from the Dust Bells 2 portfolio (taken between 1970 and 1974, published in 2004). Others are similar in size or slightly smaller (12x18).

Comments/Context: Even though the main thread of the 1970s color story is now well known, this vein of photography continues to be an active area for exploration and (re)discovery. Likely due to the predominance of color in today's contemporary work and the powerful influence of the early color photographers on those working today, there seems to be a consistent interest in going back to the roots of this narrative and revisiting the evolution of the major practitioners. This exhibit focuses on three of the main players (Eggleston, Shore, and Meyerowitz), while the related survey book covers a much broader selection of photographers (by the way, there was also a terrific exhibit at Julie Saul in 2008 here that collected some of these same artists).

While this show is directly making a case for Meyerowitz' rightful inclusion at the top echelon of the 1970s color establishment, I must admit that it was the Egglestons that really made me think. Placed in the side-by-side temporal context with Shore and Meyerowitz, Eggleston's images display a marked difference in photographic style. I found his approach to be significantly more radical: the compositions are skewed and off-kilter and the colors are much stronger and more saturated - I concluded that these works were less about their depicted subjects and much more about color itself. A room becomes orange, a wall is green, a car is red - the colors are purer and the aesthetic is more wholly new, an entire rethinking of photography based on how color really operates.

For Shore and Meyerowitz, these artists seemed to be using more established modes of picture making (drawn from various black and white traditions) and modifying them for the successful inclusion of color, more evolution than revolution. In these cases, the use of color transforms topographical images or motion-filled street shots in new ways; there are new compositional nuances and relationships to explore. Hotel rooms, shop fronts, clusters of people on street corners, TVs and dated furniture, clothing and patterned fabrics, they all present newfound opportunities to build color-oriented pictures. I particularly enjoyed the angles of Shore's striped rug and yellow bedspread at the Harbor View Motel, and Meyerowitz' colorful neon circles on the ceiling of a food stand at the Hartford county fair.

What I like best about this exhibit is that it has just enough depth to tease out the patterns and differences. Instead of just one or two pictures hung together sampler-style (which is often how early color is treated), this show allows for a more thoughtful and deeper comparison of contrasting approaches and experiments.

Collector's POV: The prices for the works in this show are as follows:

• Stephen Shore: The vintage chromogenic contact prints are either $18500 or $24000. The larger c-prints are $25000, and the pigment print of Shore's journal page is $6000.
• Joel Meyerowitz: The vintage dye transfers are either $32000 or $40000; the RC prints range between $14000 and $35000. The later prints are priced based on size, starting at $10000 for the 20x24s, moving to $16000 for the 30x40s, and ending at $24000 for the 48x60s.
• William Eggleston: Most of the available images are priced at $20000. Several (including the red ceiling and the drink on the airplane tray table) have been marked SOLD or NFS.

These prices seem generally on the high side (this is gallery retail after all), especially when placed in the context of recent secondary market sales of roughly equivalent material.

Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:

• Review: New Yorker (here)
• Joel Meyerowitz artist site (here)
• William Eggleston artist site (here)

Pioneers of Color

Through April 24th

Edwynn Houk Gallery
745 Fifth Avenue

New York, NY 10151

William Eggleston, 21st Century @Cheim & Read

JTF (just the facts): A total of 24 color images, framed in white and matted, and hung in two skylit gallery spaces divided by a wall partition. All of the works are pigment prints, printed in editions of 7, and sized 28x22 or reverse. The images were taken between 1999 and 2007. A similar exhibition is running concurrently at Victoria Miro in London (here). (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: While the pairing of Diane Arbus and William Eggleston has some obvious rock star marketing appeal, I'd like to think that of all the works that could have been chosen to juxtapose with new pictures by Eggleston, the selection of Arbus' images without people (review here) is a thoughtful reminder of one of things that has been happening in Eggleston's work in recent years - the people have been disappearing.

I think there are several important trends to be discovered in Eggleston's work of the past decade, all on display in this fine exhibit:

• Across the board, there is less story and/or narrative to be discerned; with one exception (a frontal head shot), there are virtually no portraits or interactive human scenes in this show. There are no back stories or tall tales to be imagined or puzzled out, and the environment is no longer completely rooted in the American South.
• The compositions are becoming altogether more fragmented and painterly. While the images are still representational (with recognizable objects as subjects), the works oscillate back and forth between simple documentation of "things" and purer aesthetic relationships of form and color. These visual interconnections of space, texture and pigment occur in ways that are wholly unrelated to the content or context of the subject matter. I hesitate to take the easy way out and call the works "abstract", as I think that misses the intensity of the back and forth movement between simple recognition and more complex color theory.
• The prints are now digital, and are getting bigger. This is exposing some minor flaws in the technical aspects of Eggleston's focus and printing; the icebox image is particularly grainy and digitally pixelated.

Walking around the exhibit, my brain followed a familiar pattern in front of each picture: an initial period of recognition (what exactly is this?), followed quickly by a more protracted look at the two dimensional space of the photograph, and how Eggleston had used the colors and shapes to create pattern and composition:

• Soapy water on a car windshield becomes a cosmic brew of blue, green, and purple.
• A red dumpster sits in the alley behind an orange building with a red door; the content dissolves and the image becomes a study in angles and hues.
• A table with a chaotic jumble of kitchy dated lamps is further complicated by the arcs of orange and blue hula hoops stored underneath and a dark black shadow that carves its way across the upper left corner.

My two favorite pictures in the show were the image of a pink tiled bathroom in Cuba, with veiled light shining in through the pale orange and pink billows of a linen curtain, and the image of a silver spoon left on a rough hewn windowsill in Kentucky, flanked by yellow painted clapboard and shards of broken glass splattered on the deck below; the composition is a master class in slashing lines and diagonals.

While each image in this show can hold your interest intellectually, not every one is equally moving or memorable; there is a hit or miss quality to the work that left me repeatedly circling back to the those successful pictures that vibrated with more lyrical power. But even with a little unevenness, there are plenty of examples of Eggleston at his best on view here, taking seeming casual glances at the mundane and turning them into something spectacular.
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Collector's POV: The works in this exhibit are being sold in price escalating editions of 7; the prints begin at $7500, move to $10000, and end at $12000 - several of the images I inquired about (including the pink curtain) were already sold out. Eggleston prints are now routinely available in the secondary markets, where recent prices have ranged from approximately $5000 all the way up to $250000 for his most iconic vintage dye transfers. The 2008 auction of the Berman collection of Eggleston images at Christie's is a good source for current market conditions for his work (preview post here, results post here).
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Rating: ** (two stars) VERY GOOD (rating system described here)
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Transit Hub:

• Eggleston Trust (here)
• Review: Guardian (here)
• Democratic Camera @Whitney, 2008, DLK COLLECTION review (here)
• Paris, 2009, DLK COLLECTION review (here)

William Eggleston, 21st Century

Through February 13th

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Cheim & Read

547 West 25th Street

New York, NY 10001

Auction: The American Landscape: Color Photographs from the Collection of Bruce and Nancy Berman, October 7, 2009 @Christie's

Christie's begins its busy Fall photography season with a selection of color photographs from the collection of Bruce and Nancy Berman. Many collectors will remember that the public dismantling of this collection began last Fall, with a very successful sale devoted entirely to William Eggleston (preview here, results here). The group of images up for sale now also has a heavy dose of Eggleston's work, mixed with a variety of other well known photographers who have documented vernacular American architecture/life (mostly small town/rural) in its various forms; many of these images were on view at the Getty in 2006 (here).

Given the strong influence of Eggleston, Shore, Sternfeld, Christenberry, and others on the current crop of contemporary photographers working in color, this sale is a great chance for collectors to tie together the "vintage" and "contemporary" realms we discussed a bit last week; nearly 85% of the lots here are in the lower price range, making it more realistic/reasonable to pick up an image or two from these earlier masters to help tell the back story of a contemporary color collection. Overall there are a total of 189 lots of photography on offer, with a total High estimate of $1679000. (Catalog cover at right.)

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Here's the breakdown:

Total Low Lots (high estimate up to and including $10000): 160

Total Low Estimate (sum of high estimates of Low lots): $955000
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Total Mid Lots (high estimate between $10000 and $50000): 27

Total Mid Estimate: $414000
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Total High Lots (high estimate above $50000): 2

Total High Estimate: $310000

The top lot by High estimate is lot 151, Bruce Davidson, Subway portfolio, 1980, at $150000-250000.

Here's a list of the photographers who are represented by more than five lots in the sale (with the number of lots on offer in parentheses):

William Eggleston (58)

William Christenberry (21)

Joel Sternfeld (13)

Stephen Shore (10)

Mitch Epstein (8)

Harry Callahan (6)

Robert Polidori (6)

Alec Soth (5)

Zoe Leonard (5)

Even though we have virtually no color in our collection at the moment, there is plenty to tempt us in this sale. Here are some of the highlights from our perspective.

• Lot 4, Alec Soth, No.48, Cadillac Motel, 2005 (cover lot, top)
• Lot 21 William Eggleston, Untitled, 1971/1999
• Lots 27 and 28, Walker Evans, Untitled, 1973-1974 (SX-70 Polaroids)
• Lot 115 William Eggleston, Untitled from Los Alamos portfolio Cousins, 1966-1974/2002 (image at right, middle)
• Lot 121 William Eggleston, Untitled, Berlin from Kiss Me Kracow, 1983
• Lot 149 William Eggleston, Untitled, Mississippi, late 1970s (image at right, bottom)
• Lot 177 William Christenberry, Otis and Willi Mae Hicks Store, Outside Greensboro, Alabama, 1987, and T.B. Hicks Store (detail), Newbern, Alabama, 199

The complete lot by lot catalog can be found here. The eCatalogue is located here.

The American Landscape: Color Photographs from the Collection of Bruce and Nancy Berman

October 7th
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Christie's

20 Rockefeller Plaza

New York, NY 10020

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UPDATE: The folks at Christie's have reminded me that the first sale in the Berman series was actually not the Eggleston sale that I mentioned above, but the sale of Diane Arbus images the previous spring (April 2008). Of course, they're right; my mistake.

Book: William Eggleston, Paris

JTF (just the facts): Published in 2009 by Steidl (here) and the Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain (here). 184 pages, with 68 color photographs and 37 color drawings, divided into two intermixed sections. (Cover shot at right, via Photo Eye.)

Comments/Context: Given the amount of adulation William Eggleston has received in recent years, it hardly seems to matter whether he ever makes another photograph; his influential place in the history of photography is already well solidified. And yet, here he is with a new body of work, continuing to refine his unique way of seeing.

Eggleston's images of contemporary urban Paris (taken in the past three years) continue his evolution toward more fragmented and abstracted pictures. These works include less people and tell less complex narratives than his iconic images of the 1970s. There are more chaotic splinters and shards of frantic eye catching color; graffiti, commercial signage/posters, and neon lights all make repeated appearances. But each and every image still has at least one surprising element of color: a shiny red shoe, a pair of yellow shorts on a green park bench, a pink hat and a pink car together, or a reflected neon green glow captured in wet pavement.

Interleaved with the photographs are a number of densely patterned abstract drawings, reminiscent of mid career De Kooning (although less violent) or Kandinsky. At first glance, I found these splashes of manic expressive color distracting; there's just too much stimulation to ignore them. But if we credit Eggleston's genius as primarily that of a highly attuned eye for the relationships of color, then these drawings make more sense in the context of the photographs; they are simply a different manifestation of the same creative impulse, and the juxtapositions of the two show us themes and variations (in a musical sense) as they blast through his mind.

In general, the photographs in this body of work are uneven, and perhaps could have used a heavier hand in editing; overall, it's not as strong top to bottom as some of his earlier projects. But if we strip away the bottom half and look only at the best of what's found in this volume, it is clear that Eggleston still has an amazing eye for the overlooked, and can find unexpected hints of beauty almost anywhere.

Collector’s POV: William Eggleston is represented by Cheim and Read in New York (here). According to the gallery, the images in the show/book were artist’s proofs for exhibition only and there are no plans to edition them for sale. They are planning to have some of the drawings available when they open a show of new work by Eggleston in January 2010.

Transit Hub:

• Exhibition reviews: Telegraph (here), Guardian (here), Eyecurious (here)
• Current issue of Aperture, containing a selection of Eggleston's drawings (here)

William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1968-2008 @Whitney

JTF (just the facts): A total of 159 images (134 color and 25 black and white), along with 2 videos, and 4 cases of miscellaneous materials (books, catalogs, album covers etc.), hung in a series of 10 divided spaces, covering the entire third floor of the museum. (Memphis, 1971, at right.)

Comments/Context: So much has been written about William Eggleston's original 1976 show at the MoMA (scandalous! boring! notorious! ground breaking!) and its subsequent impact on several generations of color photographers that it has taken on a legendary aura. So it is somewhat surprising that it has taken more than 30 years for any New York museum to give him another solo show. The comprehensive retrospective now on view at the Whitney covers the entire span of his career, from his early black and white images, through the famous William Eggleston's Guide project/show, and on through a number of other strong bodies of work, up to the present.

Over the years, the never ending mantra on Eggleston has been his amazing use of color. Ah, the color! Lush color, subtle color, saturated color, color tuned by warm light, glorious color (and a staggering number of bad puns and word games using color: "local color", "living color" etc.). In seeing all this work together for the first time, I came to see the color as part of a larger puzzle, where the real genius of Eggleston lies in composition, in the most mundane of questions about where to put the camera. I imagine his artist's brain working something like this: out on a random walk, shooting pictures, his eye catches a glimpse of a breathtaking (insert color here - green, for example, as in the picture above right). The harder question then becomes, how to turn this mundane, ordinary subject (albeit with a graceful set of colors) into something interesting? Eggleston's vision took him even a step further, where these commonplace scenes (primarily of the rural South) are somehow filled with an intensity of emotion, a Faulkner-esque dread in many cases. While not every image Eggleston has taken is a winner, there are far too many iconic compositions in this show for it to be luck. And while his work is often labeled as having a "snapshot aesthetic", the consistency of his approach, across the years and in work that is lesser known, is the stunning takeaway for me from this exhibit.

All of Eggleston's "greatest hits" are on view here: the tricycle, the red ceiling (Untitled, 1973 at right), the dog licking the puddle, the peaches sign, most of them displayed in the entry or in the cavernous central room (where images from the Guide, the 14 Pictures portfolio and the Troubled Waters portfolio are intermingled). The three galleries on the right side were of the most interest to me. In the first room, Eggleston's early black and white images from the early 1960s are shown. In these pictures, you can see Eggleston experimenting with composition and exploring the everyday American subjects around him (diners, drive-ins, cars), as he refined his approach to the medium. The middle room on the right holds 20 pictures from the Los Alamos series, along with some other ephemera in cases. There were unexpectedly many more tremendous images in this group that I had remembered. In the far right room, Eggleston's black and white video Stranded in Canton is shown on four stations, along with some less than remarkable large scale black and white portraits. The video is a wild, boozy, almost surreal vision of nightlife, fast food and other general weirdness. The scenes near the end of a rowdy group of men biting the heads off of chickens (the heads drop, the headless bodies jerk and twitch) are creepy and unsettling.

The rooms on the left side and back of the exhibit trace a variety of projects and commissions, picking representative samples and highlights from each. There are works from the Carter commission project, the Graceland commission, the Dust Bells portfolio, the Southern Suite, the Morals of Vision portfolio, the Democratic Vision portfolio, the True Stories project, a selection of new works (printed larger than anything else in the show) and a few portraits. There are winners buried here as well, although in lesser numbers and with lesser overall intensity somehow.

Beyond the work, a few comments on the staging of the exhibit are in order. In general, the structure and architecture of this show are weak, and make the work seem less inspiring than it is. While there is a general chronology at play, it is hidden and needed to be much more explicit. An opportunity to tell a much more linear narrative of the evolution of Eggleston's art was missed. While there are some interesting juxtaposition of images, the scale of the rooms and the expanses of space in the middle tend to encourage scanning the images from 20 feet, rather than getting up close to engage them more intimately, so these interrelationships are lost. There is an aimless, wandering style to this exhibit, and a tendency to see your favorites from afar and "check them off", thus all the works from various time periods wash together and lose definition. And why the Whitney didn't do an audio guide, taking advantage of Eggleston's marvelous gravelly Southern drawl is beyond me (there is a short video of Eggleston on the Whitney website however, linked below).

But putting these distractions and detractors aside, the work in this exhibit is forceful, novel, and memorable, and the retrospective format does a good job of covering all Eggleston's periods of work. Simply put, it is a must-see show of a masterful career.

Collector's POV: The recent auction of the Berman collection of Eggleston images at Christie's is the best proxy for current market conditions for Eggleston's work (preview post here, results post here). In general, demand and prices are both high and consistently strong. At retail, Eggleston is represented by Cheim & Read (site here), although there are 26 galleries listed on artnet that claim to have Eggleston inventory, so his work is spread around the market a bit. Beyond the original color dye transfers, some new digital prints are now available. The Eggleston Trust website can be found here.

Rating: *** (three stars) EXCELLENT (rating system described here)

William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs and Video, 1968-2008
Through January 25th

Whitney Museum of American Art
945 Madison Avenue
New York, NY 10021

Auction: Photographs by William Eggleston from the Collection of Bruce and Nancy Berman, October 13, 2008 @Christie's

Following up on the white glove sale of Diane Arbus prints from the Berman collection last spring, a second single artist sale from the same collection has been organized for this season, focused on the work of William Eggleston. The sale material spans his entire career, with negatives starting in the mid 1960s and continuing up through 2001. All the work is in color.

There are a total of 60 lots in the sale, with a total high estimate of $2191000 (the sum of the high estimates of all the lots).

• In the Low range (high estimate $10000 and lower), there are 8 lots with a total high estimate of $63000
• In the Mid range (high estimate above $10000 up through $50000), there are 43 lots with a total high estimate of $938000
• And in the High range (high estimate above $50000), there are 9 lots with a total high estimate of $1190000

Given this generally elevated set of prices, it is interesting to note that 39 of the 60 lots in this sale are later prints (only 21 vintage, as defined to be within 2 years of the negative date), and that the gap between the prices of vintage and later (the multiplier if you will) is very difficult to discern, as the prices are all overlapping, depending on the image quality. This is evidence that the Eggleston market is strong, and I think there will be some big prices realized here on specific lots.

Although clearly an important photographer, Eggleston doesn't fit particularly well into our subject matter driven, black and white collection. Here are a handful of lots that we do find of interest:

• Lot 114 Untitled (Arizona) 2001 is a group of artificial flowers and could go in our floral genre
• Lot 132 Untitled (Memphis, Tennessee) 1979 is the Used Tires gas station image and could fit into our industrial genre
• Lot 140 Memphis 1971 is the green shower image, which doesn't fit anywhere but is an amazing image regardless (even if it is a later print)
• Lot 150 Untitled 1971 is the Peaches sign and could fit our industrial genre

Photographs by William Eggleston from the Collection of Bruce and Nancy Berman
October 13, 2008

Christie's
20 Rockefeller Plaza
New York, NY 10020

UPDATE: read the entertaining back story to the sale here.