6 ★ FTWeekend 2 November/3 November 2019
Quick work from Patrick Drahi, the
founder of telecoms and media group
Altice and the new owner of Sotheby’s,
who this week brought in Altice USA’s
co-president and chief financial officer,
Charles Stewart, to run the auction
house. The decision comes just a few
weeks after Drahi’s deal was
completed, at which point the new
owner also replaced Mike Goss,
Sotheby’s chief financial officer, and
John Cahill, chief commercial officer,
with the chief executive of his family
office, Jean-Luc Berrebi.
As chief executive, Stewart replaces
Tad Smith, who joined Sotheby’s in
2015 from Madison Square Garden and
led it to its successful sale, which closed
at $57 per share on October 3. Smith’s
severance package amounts to $28.2m,
including the value of his performance
and deferred stock units, according to
Sotheby’s regulatory filing of August 7.
His existing shares in the company also
brought in $14.8m (including $954,180
on behalf of his family) as a result of
the deal, according to another
regulatory filing of October 4. Smith
has subsequently bought an
undisclosed personal stake in
Sotheby’s as a private business and
stays on as an adviser to Stewart for
the time being.
Stewart, 49, also worked as an
investment banker at Morgan Stanley
for 19 years and was chief executive of
the Latin American bank holding
company, Itaú BBA. While the artworld is virgin territory, Stewart has,
according to Drahi’s statement, an
“appetite for innovation, taking smart
risks and challenging the status quo”.
What exactly that could mean for
Sotheby’s is still unknown but Stewart’s
internal email to staff, seen by the
Financial Times, promises that “the
ambitions and opportunities will be
significant.” Based on management’s
speedy actions so far, we will hear
more soon.October was a good month for Old
Master paintings at auction. On
Sunday, a work with the ideal back
story — namely, it was a chance
discovery in an elderly woman’s
kitchen in France — sold for €19.5m
(€24.2m with fees, est €4m-€6m) at
Actéon auction house in Senlis,
northern France. “The Mocking of
Christ”, attributed to the 13th-century
Byzantine master Cimabue, attracted
six bidders on the phone and three
in the auction room, before selling
to the London and Monaco
dealership Moretti.
“It’s a beautiful piece, I would have
bought it for myself if it wasn’t for a
client,” says gallery founder Fabrizio
Moretti. He would not comment on
reports that he was bidding on behalf
of the Alana collection of Renaissance
art (normally based in the US but
currently on display at the Musée
Jacquemart-André in Paris).
The work was authenticated by the
specialist Eric Turquin who says his
attribution was “impossible to
question, even in this age of doubt”.
He had matched the panel — including
its worm holes — to other panels
from a Cimabue altarpiece, now in
New York’s Frick Collection and
London’s ational Gallery.N
Earlier this year, Turquin was
responsible for attributing a painting of
Judith beheading Holofernes — also
found in a house in France, this time in
an attic — to Caravaggio. This piece
sold privately before its planned
auction so its price remains a mystery.
“We are now looking for the next
one,” Turquin says.
Meanwhile, on October 23,
Dorotheum auction house in Vienna
offered a “Madonna and Child”
painting that was attributed to an
“associate of Raphael” and that
sold ahead of its €300,000 to
€400,000 estimate for €1.3m (€1.7m
with fees). Two days before the
auction, the art historian Claudio
Strinati suggested that the work was
“initiated by Raphael”, helping to boost
its price.The building of private museums in
China continues apace, matching the
growth of cities outside of its highest
populated, Beijing and Shanghai.
Coming soon is the He Art Museum
(known as HEM) in Shunde, Foshan
(southern China). The 16,000 sq m
building has been designed by the
Japanese architect Tadao Ando and
is due to open on March 21. Its backer
is the He family, which is investing
$31m into the project, co-ordinated by
He Jianfeng, founder of the industrial
investment group Infore and directorof the museum. His father is He
Xiangjian, the Forbes-billionaire and
founder of Midea, a major appliance
manufacturer.
Plans for the museum promise a
café, bookstore and gift shop while
the works on view will include some
of the family’s Modern and
contemporary Chinese art collection
together with projects and
commissions from artists around the
world. Overseeing the curatorial
programme is Shao Shu, who joined
from China’s Long Museum and
became HEM’s deputy director in 2017.Congratulations to Mary Lane, aformer
art reporting colleague at the Wall
Street Journal and now the author of
the compelling, chilling and thoroughly
researchedHitler’s Last Hostages: Looted
Art and the Soul of the Third Reich. Lane
takes a known theme — Adolf Hitler’s
obsessions with art and cultural power
— and looks at it through the new
perspective offered by the discovery of
a trove of around 1,200 works of art
found during a tax investigation at the
Munich home of Cornelius Gurlitt in- Cornelius’s father, Hildebrand
Gurlitt, was one of the four main art
dealers for Hitler’s unrealised and
covert Führermuseum Project, for
which art was looted or bought cheaply
from museums and private collections
as the Nazis invaded Europe during the
second world war. Cornelius Gurlitt
The Art Market New chief executive for Sotheby’s; Old Masters|
hit highs; $31m for museum in China; book calls Germany to
account; Brexit guide; blue bread in Turin. ByMelanie Gerlis
Above, from left:
installation
view of Augustas
Serapinas’
‘Blue Pen’;
Madonna and
Child, school of
Raphael —David Dale
Gallery/Max Slaven;
dorofotograf2died of heart failure in 2014,
maintaining the belief that
any moral responsibility lay
at Hitler’s door. Lane does
more than tell the story and
uses her book also to
highlight the German
government’s morally blind
and “botched” handling of
the discovery (which
remained under wraps until
2014). Over the six years of
research and writing, Lane
confesses she has developed
her own “obsessive interest
in trying to find the line
where complicity with evil
becomes evil itself”. It’s a
must-read.The Brexit twists and turns
continue on an almost daily
basis, though at time of
writing it seemed sure that
the UK was not going to
crash out of the European
Union on October 31. In the meantime,
the Lapada association of UK art and
antiques dealers (supported by its
fellow BADA members organisation)
has published a “Be Brexit Ready”
guide for the trade. Free to download
via lapada.org/Brexit-readiness,
this prepares for a no-deal situation
and includes information on importing
and exporting between the UK and EU,
such as the necessary forms to fill and
the likely VAT processes. Happily, a
spokeswoman confirms, the plan is to
update the guide as and when new
information becomes available.London’s Emalin and Brescia’sApalazzo
galleries are serving up an installation
of blue bread at the 26th edition of the
Artissima fair, which opens in Turin
this weekend (November 1-3). The
work they are bringing, “Blue Pen”
(2018-19), is by the young Lithuanian
artist Augustas Serapinas, and recalls a
story that he heard in preparation for a
Glasgow International festival
exhibition at David Dale Gallery last
year. The tale goes that, 40 years ago, a
local scaffold manufacturer built access
equipment to inspect a commercial
bakery and an engineer accidentally
dropped a blue pen into the mixing
bowls, leading to 10,000 loaves that
had to be removed from production.
Serapinas hasn’t made quite as many:
his installation incorporates about 350
loaves and is priced at €35,000.Collecting
Coming up
Don’t miss our Collecting
supplement on November
30, focusing on Art in the
Americas, previewing Art
Basel Miami Beach and the
wider art scene in the area:collectors, curators, artists
and trends, and including:
the new Rubell Museum in-
Miami- Design/Miami
- Art Basel’s new Meridians
section
In January and Febraury
2020, our supplements focus
on Taipei and Los Angeles.All our Collecting
supplements can be found
at ft.com/collectingAuction
house
changes
‘The Mocking of
Christ’ (13th
century) by
Cimabue,
recently
rediscovered
and sold for
€19.5m
NOVEMBER 2 2019 Section:Weekend Time: 10/201930/ - 18:51 User:david.cheal Page Name:CNV6, Part,Page,Edition:CNV, 6, 1