Gauguin Sculpture

Art market news: Gauguin sculpture mysteriously withdrawn from sale is back on market

A rare Gauguin sculpture goes on sale and Asian art sales in New York accumulated to over £200 million.

A rare sculpture by Gauguin that was mysteriously withdrawn from sale last November, is to be shown in London this month before finally hitting the auction block in New York at Sotheby's in May.

The 9 1/2 inch wooden sculpture, Jeune Tahitienne (pictured), was carved by Gauguin in Tahiti circa 1893, and is decorated with a red coral and shell necklace. The sculpture is the only known fully worked three dimensional bust portrait produced by Gauguin during his first trip to Tahiti. He made other carvings, but they are in a flatter, relief style.

Gauguin's Tahitian sculptures were not well received by the French critics when first shown in Paris. As a result, most were given to a friend whose daughter eventually donated them to French museums. Jeune Tahitienne was given to Jeanne Fournier, the daughter of a collector to whom Gauguin had promised a gift from the tropics. In 1961, Fournier entrusted it to a monk of the Dominican Order for sale, and it was acquired by the present owner that year at Sotheby's for £11,500. It has never been exhibited since. As Gauguin's Tahitian sculptures are so rare, Sotheby's has made an educated guess that this is worth between £10 million and £15 million.

Record prices tumbled at Bonhams' South African art sale in London last week for paintings that had never made it to the saleroom to be viewed. Irma Stern's 'African Priest', which had been on loan to the Irma Stern Museum in Cape Town for 40 years, was considered of such cultural importance that it had not been granted an export license to leave the country. Still, it sold in Bond Street for a record £3 million. Similarly, a 1942 view of a street in District Six, a poor area of Cape Town, by leading black artist, Gerard Sekoto, could not leave South Africa but still sold for a record 602,400 pounds, double the estimate. Bonhams' South African sales have become heavily reliant on paintings by Stern. Altogether, four works by her contributed just over £6 million to Bonhams' £9 million total. However, another six works by her, estimated to fetch at least £3 million between them, were unsold.

Chinese dealers and collectors descended on Sotheby's and Christie's for their Asian art sales in New York last week which accumulated just over £200 million in sales, a 56 percent increase on the previous record for the series in New York, set in 2007. Top price was £18 million for a famille rose vase which Sotheby's had described as 20th century and estimated at just £800. Clearly bidders thought otherwise. Chinese works of art accounted for three quarters of the week's takings, against the Indian and South East Asian sections which looked undervalued by comparison.

Most vulnerable area of the market appeared to be for modern and contemporary Indian art where paintings by market favourites, MF Husain, SH Raza, and Sunil Gupta in the £500,000 to £1 million range did not sell. Works from the Saatchi collection by TV Santhosh and Rashid Rana were also unsold.