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.
I see that São Schlumberger died last August, but you can still visit her MySpace page! Obviously they would have an excellent wi-fi connection in Heaven.
Sotheby’s had several other Dalí items on the block on Thursday, mostly prints, including this 1974 gouache, “Vermeer’s The Love Letter” (detail below), which was expected to bring between $40,000 and $50,000 and did so on the high side: $49,000.
The auction house called it a “gouache on lithographic reproduction … for a work from the artist’s series of prints entitled ‘Changes in Great Masterpieces’.”
