An art market adage repeated frequently during the Covid-19 lockdowns and amid the downturn of the past two years holds that the availability of true masterpieces will bring out serious bidders even in the most challenging economic conditions. The auction houses holding their marquee spring sales in New York next month have little choice but to stress test that truism as members of the global collector class hold their breath in anticipation of US President Donald Trump’s on-again, off-again global tariffs brawl.
For its part, Christie’s is betting that a canonical Andy Warhol canvas with top-shelf provenance can spark interest: it will offer the pink-hued acrylic-and-silkscreen Big Electric Chair (1967-68) during its evening sale of 20th-century art at Rockefeller Center in mid-May, with an on-request estimate in the region of $30m.
The six-foot-wide painting comes from the collection of the Belgian arts patrons Roger Matthys (1920-2016) and Hilda Colle (1919-2004). The collectors were “among the most influential personalities in the Belgian contemporary art world”, according to Peter van der Graaf, an international specialist of post-war and contemporary art at Christie’s. “With a personal collection reflecting important art movements of the contemporary era for the past 50 years, they have left their mark by lending many of their works to artist’s retrospectives and exhibitions as well as a long-term loan to the SMAK, including works by other icons of the 21st century.”
The couple began collecting in the 1950s and counted among their holdings stand-out works by Sol LeWitt, Roy Lichtenstein, Bruce Nauman, Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist and others. Matthys co-founded the organisation now known as Friends of SMAK, which supports Ghent’s municipal museum of contemporary art. Warhol’s Big Electric Chair is one of the works from the couple’s collection that had been on long-term loan to SMAK.
Warhol’s electric chair canvases of the 1960s are among his most indelible works, and he made 14 of them in all. The example from the Matthys-Colle collection is the only one in the series that features an electric chair rendered in black against a monochrome ground. If it achieves its estimate or even comes within $10m, it will set a new secondary-market record for the series, besting another Big Electric Chair (1967-68) executed on a trichromatic blue, green and pink ground, which sold for $20.4m (with fees) at a Sotheby’s sale in New York in 2014 (against an estimate of $18m to $25m).
Other series and images dominate the highest end of Warhol’s market, with Shot Sage Blue Marilyn (1964) setting his all-time auction record when it sold for $195m (with fees) at Christie’s in New York in May 2022. Other top results for the Pop artist’s work include examples from his Car Crash series, images of Elvis Presley, Marlon Brando and Elizabeth Taylor, and repeated renderings of Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper and Mona Lisa, among others.
Despite the challenging macroeconomic forces unleashed by Trump, auction houses will be hoping to rebound during this season’s sales after a difficult 2024. According to the most recent UBS and Art Basel Art Market report, release earlier this week, auction houses’ sales dropped 20% by value from 2023 to 2024.
