A quick snapshot of the sales at Art Basel

‘The Buzz in Basel: Art, Alive and Well and Selling Briskly’, is the title of a news report in The New York Times that effectively captures the mood there. Terming it as ‘the holy grail of contemporary art fairs’, the report mentions:

“This season’s event is as big and boisterous as ever, spanning more than 300 galleries from 37 countries. The quality of work was noticeably better than it had been a year ago. Barbara Kruger’s 1987 photographic silk-screen of a woman’s hands covering her face was bought by Sandy Heller, a Manhattan art adviser who works with hedge-fund billionaires, for $700,000.

Bigger sales were reported too. Here is a quick snapshot of some of the deals struck:

- At Jan Krugier, a gallery in Geneva and New York, Picasso’s ‘Personnage’, a 1960 plaster sculpture, sold to an unidentified collector for $15 million.
- Hauser & Wirth, dealers with spaces in Zurich, London and New York, sold a set of five dwarf sculptures from Paul McCarthy’s ‘White Snow’ series, to a European collector for $3 million.
- Pieces by late Louise Bourgeois were hot commodities. At Xavier Hufkens, a Brussels dealer, a 2009 mixed-media work on paper, ‘A Baudelaire (#7)’, priced at more than $650,000, was snapped up.
- Michael Werner Gallery of New York sold two works by Sigmar Polke, the German artist who died last week. His ‘Here and Elsewhere’, a 1975-76 photo collage that was priced at $450,000, was bought by an American collector.
- A multi-layered abstract painting with an asking price of around $1.5 million was purchased by a European foundation. Work by artists from the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s who had been overlooked was evident.
- Capitalizing on the Yves Klein retrospective at the Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden in Washington, Manhattan dealer David Zwirner got Anthropometrie’ (1960).

In fact, there was a proliferation of videos this year. “It’s all about the bottom line,” explained Lucy Mitchell-Innes, a Manhattan dealer. “It’s much cheaper to put a DVD in the mail than it is to bring a bronze sculpture.” But there was much more to see and savor at Art Basel 2010.