Mica’s Magritte, a Train Full of Harings, and Cattelan’s Banana: It’s Auction Week in New York

If you take stock of all the art up in New York City this fall, my Lord—it’s kind of an embarrassment of riches. The museums just rolled out the big shows, which means the highly anticipated “Flight into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt” opens at The Met this weekend, and the fabulous Orphism show is up at the Guggenheim, with bold-colored abstract gems dotting the spiral ramp up the rotunda. Christian Marclay’s 24-hour tick-tocking masterwork The Clock is now on view at MoMA, and the Alvin Ailey show at the Whitney is a showstopper. One could spend a whole day crawling through the big shops at Chelsea, or checking out what’s up Tribeca, where dozens of galleries have opened up shop in the blocks between Broadway and Church in the last five years. It’s a lot.

But low-key: The best place to see art for this specific moment in New York isn’t the museums or the galleries, it’s the auction houses—which are open to the general public (and totally free!)—showing off the billions of dollars of art that they expect to sell next week. And if you don’t go now, all this art is gone forever, shipped off to the ports of call and homes of their new owners.

I’ll be on the ground to take in all the gavel action—and to see if the election of Donald Trump and the surging stock market have any impact on the depth of bidding—but before then, let’s take a quick spin through some of the goods on the block next week, shall we?

Christie’s is selling off the estate of Mica Ertegun, the consummate Manhattan doyenne, who counted among her close confidants everyone from Jackie O to Mick Jagger to Henry Kissinger to Bette Midler to the Southampton-based Orthodox priest Father Alexander Karloutsos. She died last year, three years shy of being a centenarian. Until Tuesday, New Yorkers can swing by Rockefeller Center and walk through the aisles to gawk at the elegant objects that filled the life of Mica and her husband, the incredibly influential music executive Ahmet Ertegun, who died in 2006 after a fall at Bill Clinton’s 60th birthday party at the Beacon Theater, while the Rolling Stones performed—one of the great lives lived by anyone, it’s been argued.

ED RUSCHA, Standard Station, Ten-Cent Western Being Torn In HalfCourtesy of CHRISTIE’S IMAGES LTD. 2024.

“She died at 97, so she was one of these children of the century who got to see and do seemingly everything and travelled everywhere who had homes everywhere,” said Max Carter, Christie’s vice chairman of 20th and 21st century art.

It’s one of the few estates being sold this week that gives the auctions their oomph, even if it won’t bring in the hundreds of millions that the estates of Paul Allen or David Rockefeller have minted in recent years.

“For the last few seasons, the demand hasn’t been lacking—it’s the supply that’s always variable, and I feel very confident about this particular season because we have so many special things, so many things that are generational opportunities,” Carter went on. “There are many other things in Mica’s collection, many things in the various owners’ collections, which have been tucked away for decades, and which you won’t really find again if you don’t act now.”

The star lot from the collection is a Rene Magritte that the Erteguns bought from Byron Gallery on Madison Avenue in 1968, when Ertegun was nearing his peak as a music industry kingpin and Mica was launching her interior design firm, MAC II. She designed apartments for her incredible array of friends and collaborators: Bill Blass, Alice Walton, Keith Richards, Michael Eisner, and Jimmy Buffett. She also designed her own apartment, and this Magritte had pride of place in their home.

“The Magritte is unparalleled—it’s been off the market for a really long time, so not only is it iconic, it’s irreplaceable, it’s got provenance and a freshness to the market that always drives demand,” said the art adviser Megan Fox Kelly, who has a number of clients planning to bid next week.