The Denver City Council is deaccessioning 4 works by the important abstract expressionist artist Clyfford Still and the bid departments at Sotheby’s and Christie’s both pulled out all the stops to land the works. Sotheby’s ultimately won the works but Christie’s has been arguing the award to Sotheby’s has been “arbitrary and capricious.”

The other interesting thing about this consignment is just how privately Sotheby’s marketed the Still paintings. “Sotheby’s will try to sell the paintings through a private sale, but if they are not sold by September 19, they will be featured at the November 9 contemporary art auction in New York.”

Christie’s still has not relented but it appears that the Denver City Council was not overly impressed with Christie’s presentation. According to the New York Observer: “Jan Brennan, the director of Denver’s Office of Cultural Affairs, told The Denver Post yesterday, ‘The reason we picked Sotheby’s is they had a very thorough presentation and proposal that gave us a number of options.’”

Sotheby’s was unable to place the four Still paintings in a museum, so we can see them coming to auction on November 9th in New York.

Just months ago, there were discussions that 980 Madison was no longer going to be an uptown mecca for high end art. You could visit the Gagosian pop-up shop on the first floor but for real art you had to go into the building and visit them or the Picassos in Jan Krugier. In case you were short on liquidity you could stop by Art Capital Group and leverage your art collection for cash. Then Mr. Krugier died and the operations were moved overseas and mega-collector Mr. Aby Rosen, owner of the building, announced he wanted to convert the building to a residential condominium tower to be designed by starchitect Lord Norman Foster.

Enough with the digression, the real point is Larry Gagosian bought a new home (who knows if it will just be a home). The Harkness Mansion is now his.

Gagosian is also doing a show of Bob Dylan’s recent work from his travels through Asia.

The big art law question for the fall is whether the Supreme Court will hear the restitution claim being made by the heirs of George Grosz against the Museum of Modern Art. MoMA, through its attorneys, continues to rely on procedural or technical defenses rather than deal with the merits of the case. Fortunately for MoMA, the lower courts have found these defenses persuasive. While the Grosz heirs have morality, the ethical imperative and various international museum declarations and ethical codes on their side, we would think this would provide for the heirs of George Grosz to receive back the three artworks.

Art Double-Dip?

Auction for Haiti

Occupy Wall Street

You may have read about anarchists and their associates protesting at Wall Street about the economy and social classes in America. There was no coherent message but the Occupy Wall Street members took up the cause of the striking Sotheby’s art handler’s union at the auction on September 22, 2011. It is a video worth watching, despite the sparse crowd for the antics.