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The Specialist | From Canvas to Canon: Joan Mitchell’s King of Spades, with Courtney Kremers
00:15:25
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cash back per month welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm Head of Programming Conor Boyle. Today, something a little different. We're excited to share with you a handpicked episode of a brand new series, the Specialist, produced by Intelligence Squared in partnership with Sotheby's. We've all heard the stories of the record breaking works, headline grabbing auctions and moments that shock the art world and beyond. But have you ever wondered what's happening behind the scenes? What goes into valuing a masterpiece or who the people are really behind the gavel? The Specialist brings you art's most extraordinary stories told by the experts who witness them in short episodes. Perfect for a weekend listen. Now over to the Specialist.
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I love the underdog nature of King of Spades. Certainly it set a record. At the time it was sold, it signaled the ascent of Mitchell as a serious artist. It had come up already twice on the market. It had most recently gone unsold. But then it goes on to set a new record to redefine a market. It's sort of a story of resilience and quiet ascendance. So when we were thinking about this book, it was like which Joan Mitchell painting deserves this spot? And for me, it was never a question that King of Spades would fill that place.
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Sotheby's is a temporary custodian of some of the world's most rare, remarkable and coveted art and objects. This season, inspired by Sotheby's new Book Icons published for Phaidon. We explore the treasures whose journeys define not only their own histories, but the shifting story of taste, value and culture. In each episode, we'll be exploring the significance and journey of an extraordinary work told by those who know it best. This is the specialist on today's episode, the female pioneer of abstract expressionism, whose lyrical compositions came to reset market expectations. Courtney Kremers examines King of Spades, Joan Mitchell's formative masterpiece, which signaled the convergence of her critical acclaim and market recognition. Courtney is vice chairman, Sotheby's New York, an overseas strategy for for private sales across fine art categories, and advises major clients on acquisitions and consignments. Let's join Courtney now with more.
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Joan Mitchell was really a ferociously independent painter who transformed memories, landscape, emotion into these raw, lyrical abstractions. And she did this without ever diluting her voice or trying to fit into what was then really this like male dominated, abstract expressionist canon. She came to New York in the late 1940s and there she encountered the New York school of artists really getting into full swing. So this is the era of Willem de Kooning, of Jackson Pollock, of Franz Kline, of Barnett Newman, of Adolph Gottlieb. This is almost entirely a male dominated universe at this time. But Joan falls right into step with them. She's absorbing the lessons that she's seeing really in terms of the physicality of painting. There's this bravado that comes with the painting of these artists. These are big canvases, these are expansive canvases. The post war American era that was redefining what we had thought of painting up until that time, which before had been led by, dominated really by Paris. Joan takes in all of these lessons, but then she cuts her own path. She does start to bounce back and forth to Paris quite a bit. Joan absorbs the color of Matisse, the structure of Mondrian, Cezanne, but then the bravado and the physicality of painting that she's experiencing amongst the artists in the New York school. And at that moment, it's like Joan Mitchell as we know her comes into being. 1955, we say, is like a defining moment in her career when she finds her own voice and creates her own language that marries a lot of these influences, but then is something entirely of its own. It's this like all encompassing feeling that I think Joan's canvases deliver, which makes sense on some level also because Joan was a synesthete. So all of her senses combined when she saw color, she felt an emotion. When she listened to music. She saw color. So everything kind of converges in her canvases into these worlds that she creates. King of Spades is an oil on canvas. It's just over 90 inches tall and 78 inches wide. So it's a really large canvas. And when you stand in front of it, there's a physicality to it because of its scale. I think you have at least five different shades of green, a beautiful range of blues. You have these incredible slashes of cardinal red. But what holds this composition together is her use of white. You can see when you're looking closely that there are these layers back and forth between the white, between the green and the blues and the color, of course. So the white is something that really she treats both as negative space, but it's also there in a really muscular way and very much a part of the composition. Joan Mitchell was very much influenced by what she saw in the work of Jackson Pollock. And the way that he used his body around the canvas. And this is an all over surface where every corner sort of has to hold its own. Joan was fairly prolific, but in terms of the scale and in terms of the complexity of the composition, by our estimation, there are only about 23 canvases that she painted between 1955 and 1957 that match this one in terms of quality and scale. Over half of those today are in Museum collections. 1955 is a defining moment for Joan because it's when she finds her own voice. And These canvases between 55 and 57, when she's moving back and forth quite frequently between Paris and New York. I think best exemplify that appreciation of the titans of artists that have come before her and are working around her at the time, but are entirely unique and like, exultant in their own beauty and stature. Joan would have painted King of Spades in her studio in Paris at 77 Rue Daguerre. That she was subletting that summer from the Austrian sculptor de Schnabel. And at that time she was primarily bringing her canvases then back to New York because she had a couple of galerists. So Joan would have rolled this up, probably still wet, and brought it back to New York to Eleanor Ward at the stable gallery. In 1966, it was included in an exhibition, part of the Art and Embassies program organized by MoMA. So it was shown in Bucharest in 1966, publicly for the first time. And then Xavier Fourcade, her prominent French dealer, held a show in 1980 about Mitchell in the 50s. And it was likely from this exhibition that the famed collector in Boston, Graham Gund, would have acquired King of Spades. Graham had it until 1989, when actually King of Spades first appeared at auction. And at the time, it sold for about $450,000, I think, at an estimate of 180,000 to 250,000. And then it came up again 10 years later at an estimate of 7 to 900,000, and actually went unsold. So when it came up at auction in 2004, at an estimate of 750 to a million dollars, it did come with that prior record of, as we like to say, or we sometimes say, having been bought in, which is usually considered a stain on the history of an artist's work. And I imagine that we set the estimate in 2004 at $750,000 to acknowledge partly that history of it having gone unsold. So why did this not sell in 1999 and then sell spectacularly and set a new record in 2004? I think you can attribute this to the Whitney retrospective that was held in 2002. So this was the first major retrospective that Joan Mitchell had had in the United States since she passed away in 1992. Something we often say in specialist speak is we talk about the retrospective effect and how retrospectives can be moments where certainly scholarship galvanizes around an artist and therefore the public does. They educate people and they create a buzz around artists that may not have existed prior to that. So what happened in 2004 when this comes up? The market was primed. The public was primed. There was a new excitement around Joan's work. She had been recontextualized as one of the most important Abex artists of her generation, not just as an important female artist. The auction took place on November 9, 2004, in New York. It was lot 43 out of 66 lots, and Joan was one of five female artists. The estimate was 750 to a million dollars, which was a notch above the estimate where it had gone unsold at Christie's five years prior. There were at least four bidders in the competition, and the final hammer price was $2.4 million, which was more than three times the low estimate and was a new record for Mitchell by more than a million dollars. In addition to this achieving a new record and breaking the last record by more than a million dollars, it was only the second time that a Mitchell painting had broken the $1 million mark. It put Joan on the same playing field for the first time in terms of price as the male Artists of her generation. It's the start of her ascent. $2.6 million. We're way beyond that now. In 2004, it was a record by more than a million dollars. But by 2014, Mitchell breaks the $10 million mark. And in the last three years, we've broken the $20 million mark three times. So her market is in an entirely different place than it was 20 years ago, which is great and deserve it. I think one of the wonderful things I learned in the process of co editing the Icons book is that there is not one way for a work to become an icon. There are certainly factors that are more common and you think about quality. Many of the works have some sort of rarity component and then provenance. A lot of these works were owned by exceptional people. And in some cases that's entirely why the object is included. There were so many other incredible stories, and the story of an object is also part of what made some of these things so iconic. So whether it's the Rembrandt, the young girl in the gold trimmed cloak that was recovered after a museum heist in the 1970s, or you think about Giacomo Herman's Roman baroque cabinet that was rediscovered outside a men's restroom in a pizza parlor in England, it was really fun to examine all of these stories to figure out which are the 100 that we think really define our modern history here at Sotheby's. And I loved getting to know our team, spending so much time with specialists across so many categories and hearing these stories from their perspective and listening to, you know, what, what they thought was the most iconic thing in their category and deserved a place as one of these 100. I've thought a lot about what makes an icon. Clearly I've had a lot of time to think about that. I sum it up with one word, chemistry. You think about, like, why do two people fall in love? Why do two people connect? There are so many different components and ingredients that go into the making of an icon that it's really impossible to sum it up with one. Clean, easy. Like it's iconic because of who owned it, or it's iconic because the public loved it. Because honestly, at different points in history, things that we consider icons now, people didn't like when they were first made or they didn't appreciate. So it isn't one thing. It's many little things that together create this magical explosion, shall we say, this chemistry that elevates a work from something that is just ordinary or even good into something that is exceptional, great and iconic.
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Thank you for joining us on the Specialist. This story and others are featured in the new book 100 Extraordinary Objects from Sotheby's History, available now at phaidon.com and wherever books are sold. To step further into the world of Sotheby's, visit any one of our galleries which are open to the public. Go to sotheby's.com to find out more.
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Thanks for joining us for this episode of the Specialist, produced by Intelligence Squared in partnership with Sotheby's. If you enjoyed the episode, there's a bounty of others ready for you to listen. With topics ranging from South Asian surrealism to Chinese porcelain to Persian manuscripts, you can find them being released weekly. Just search the Specialist or Sotheby's Talks wherever you're listening to this and follow the show.
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