Lehman Brothers Still Hot on Art Market
For years, Georges Schreiber’s 1945 view of a coral sun setting over Manhattan’s Financial District hung in the New York boardroom of Lehman Brothers. On Sunday, the oil painting, “Brooklyn Bridge,” was auctioned off to the highest bidder for $20,000.
The piece was part of a group of 238 modern and contemporary artworks that the bankrupt securities firm offered for sale at Freeman’s auction house to repay its creditors. (See previous article “Wall Street’s Orphaned Art”) Like the majority of the works in this sale, the Schreiber painting also sold for five times its expected price, a resounding success that underscores the public’s continued fascination with the storied bank that collapsed a year ago.
Call it the Lehman premium: The daylong auction, expected to bring in around $750,000, stretched well into the evening and brought in $1.34 million, with every single artwork finding a buyer.
At least 2,000 collectors and souvenir seekers had signed up to bid on the bank’s art, with at least 400 people packing into Freeman’s narrow salesroom and the rest bidding over the telephone or online. The salesroom’s walls were covered like a Victorian salon with the bank’s collection of pastoral landscapes and Depression-era drawings of skyscrapers, and post-war works by artists like Louise Bourgeois, David Hockney, and Roy Lichtenstein.
Don Stanton, a Boston wealth manager who sits on the board of the Rhode Island School of Design, credited the sale’s “crazily low” estimates but said the sale also showed “certain people would still like to buy anything from Lehman.”
New York collectors Jess Hackell and Judy Esterow attended the sale, as did Alexander Glauber, a corporate art adviser who once helped Lehman place the art among its offices in New York, Boston and Wilmington, Del.
Upbeat at the outset, the mood in the room wavered between giddy and exhausted as the auctioneer toggled bidding wars for most works, be it for pastoral landscapes by late Impressionists, Depression-era etchings of skyscrapers or post-war abstracts.
At least five bidders went after photographer Berenice Abbott’s views of butcher shops and skyscrapers, “New York in the 30’s.” The group, which once hung on the 31st executive floor of Lehman’s Seventh Avenue headquarters, went for $15,000, more than its $10,000 estimate.
Other works from the executive suites included James E. Allen’s 1934 etchings of steelworkers such as “The Connectors,” which sold for $3,000, more than its $1,800 estimate.
The star of the sale was a late-period Roy Lichtenstein screenprint of the Statue of Liberty, “I Love Liberty,” sold for $49,000, more than twice its high estimate. A mint-green abstract by Friedel Dzubas, “Tundra II,” from 1962 sold to an online bidder for $28,600, exceeding its $15,000 estimate.
Works that looked like bargains soared quickly. “Franklin 100,” a color screen print of a $100 bill with gold leaf by artist Tony King, was expected to go for $400 and sold for $4,687.
Robert Apfel, a New York collector of Hudson River School paintings and president of Acupay, and his wife, Jai Imbray, sat on the salesroom floor because there were no free seats. But that didn’t stop the couple from snapping up at least six works, including Louis Lozowick’s 1929 “Hanover Square” for $26,200, more than three times its high estimate.
Mr. Apfel said he was attracted to the collection’s government-commissioned cityscapes from the 1930s because they reminded him of another era when “people had a choice to go downhill but pulled themselves up again.” The fact that the works belonged to Lehman “also helped.”
Freeman’s is set to auction off the next set of Lehman’s 650-piece total collection Dec. 6.
So far, interest in Lehman’s art seems to be eclipsing demand for Lehman-related memorabilia: In the last three months, 644 items such as mugs and T-shirts tagged as “Lehman Brothers” have been posted on eBay but only about 66% have sold. Highest bid: $200 for one of the bank’s tea sets.
Source: Wall Street Journal
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