Getting hammered for his birthday

On the eve of Salvador Dalí’s 104th birthday on Sunday, a buyer in disguise handed Sotheby’s a cheque for $802,600 this week in return for the painting above, “Portrait of Madame Schlumberger”, begun in 1963 and signed in ‘65. The auction house was expecting about half a million dollars, so many happy returns all round.
Carstairs Gallery in New York bought the oil painting when the paint was barely dry, and Sotheby’s was flogging it in the same city for an “important” private collector but didn’t say who, so it’s not clear whether his model ever actually owned the thing.
“I don’t really like it,” São Schlumberger told Women’s Wear Daily in 1987. “I was expecting a fantasy … but he did a classic.”
Of Portuguese and German descent, Madame Schlumberger and her husband, the French-American oil tycoon Pierre Schlumberger, were keen on art.
She favoured Rothko, Rauschenberg and Lichtenstein, they hung out with Warhol, kept the Museum of Modern Art and Lincoln Center happy and fed Mondrian and Calder to Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts.
Dalí was pulled in to do her portrait two years after their wedding. São put on the same Givenchy gown for his several visits to their place on Sutton Place in Manhattan, and at the same time he made her a necklace, though perhaps not the one she’s holding in the painting. He was indeed in his neo-classicist era with the formal pose and fine details, so São, hankering for surrealism, had to make do with a dreamy background landscape. See the rest.





But what the hell. With amiable thanks to Sotheby’s and a respectful nod to Mr Nasher, who died in March 2007 (and his wife, who predeceased him by 19 years), here are two of the items up for bids. Above, Paul Signac’s “Clipper (Opus 155)” from 1887, and here, Rene Magritte’s “l’Okapi” from 1958.
Nasher, who built Texas’ biggest shopping mall before he established the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University in North Carolina and founded the
Signac’s “Clipper”, expected to bring between $5 million and $7 million, was painted in the same vicinity as the considerably more famous “Bathers at Asnières” by the considerably more famous pointillist Georges Seurat, a work that will coincidentally be popping up again in a forthcoming post here. 
Hannah Höch’s “Grotesque”
Back in Nairobi where Mutu was born, and in the other big African centres, contemporary artists like Bill Bidjocka, Odhiambo Siangla and Lubaina Himid have found a measure of fame, but Westerners keep asking their agents if they can get some tribal antiquities instead. These new fellows, the buyers presume, are just copying Modigliani, aren’t they?
“Mask”, 2006, archaic sculpture and modern tease.







