Now that your stocks have rebounded, you might be considering a jump back into the auction circuit.  Two upcoming sales sound noteworthy:

September 14th- Doyle New York hosts a sale of Asian Works of Art, including property of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  This gorgeous pagoda model is one such work being deaccessioned by the Met and carries an estimate of $25,000-$35,000.

November 1st- Let your art collection gain from the misfortune (and mismanagement) of others as Freeman’s auction house liquidates the modern and contemporary holdings of Lehman Brothers.  The catalog isn’t posted yet, but this article from the Philadelphia Inquirer indicates the sale won’t consist of “blockbusters,” but many solid works at lower price points.

In celebration of being accepted as a volunteer tour guide at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (well, sort of, there are nine months of training before I get started; I did get fingerprinted and my ID, though!), here are the recent happenings at the Met as told by its biggest fan, the New York Times:

- An enthusiastic review by Roberta Smith of the exhibition “Pen and Parchment: Drawing in the Middle Ages,” which runs through late August

- The Met, in an attempt to cut costs after a steep decline in its endowment, just completed a round of staff layoffs

- Holland Cotter’s review of “Michelangelo’s First Painting” concludes with this lovely paragraph: “For some reason- many reason- we need to have our superstars, our so-called geniuses, and we need them complete, every detail of their lives and works, however minor, accounted for, fitted into place, given significance.  That is how traditional art history works, and ‘Michelangelo’s First Painting’ feels like a classic exercise in that tradition, equal parts science project, forensic document and romantic quest.”

The New York Times reports that architectural artifacts from the old Chicago Stock Exchange building are increasingly becoming hot commodities on the auction block.  Museums, including the Met and the Seattle Art Museum, have acquired and are prominently displaying these treasures- attractive for both their aesthetic and historical appeal-  in their permanent collections.  Check out the full article and the accompanying slide show.

Pictured above are lovely elevator enclosure panels designed by Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan, circa 1893, for the Chicago Stock Exchange.  They’re being offered by Christie’s New York this Tuesday, June 2nd, with an estimate of $20,000-$30,000.  Perhaps I should encourage my building’s super to make the investment so as to replace our circa 1983 elevator design?

It’s like Francis Bacon week on The Amateur Art Collector!  A big retrospective of his opened at the Met yesterday, but to surprisingly little buzz in New York as far as I can tell.  There’s also a related lecture tomorrow at 6pm that’s free with museum admission.

Here’s the official website and blurb:

The first major exhibition in New York in twenty years devoted to one of the most compelling painters of the twentieth century, Francis Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective features some 130 works–sixty-five paintings and as many archival items from public and private collections from around the world–that span the entirety of the artist’s full and celebrated career. Marking the centenary of the artist’s birth in Dublin in 1909, the exhibition brings together the most significant works from each period of Bacon’s career, focusing on the key subjects and themes that run through his extraordinary creative output. The presentation affords the most comprehensive examination to date of Bacon’s sources and working processes, offering a reevaluation of the artist’s work in light of a range of new interpretations and archival materials that have emerged since his death in 1992.

It was a buyer’s market at the Christie’s Dubai sale last week.  While within the auction estimate, the evening brought in less than $5 million as compared to the $8.65 million made at the same sale a year ago.  The most expensive lot was Iranian artist Parviz Tanavoli‘s “The Wall and the Script” (pictured above), which sold for $218,500 including buyer’s premium.  In last year’s sale, a piece by the same artist sold for just under $3 million.  Check out the complete sale results at the Christie’s site here and read the Reuters article giving an overview of the auction here.

Also, today Sotheby’s had its corporate credit rating cut into “junk” territory by Standard & Poor’s, with an analyst from the agency stating the auction house is “likely to breach a financial covenant in the near term.”  That article, also from Reuters, is here.

And I don’t want to leave you on a depressing note, so here‘s a slideshow from The New York Times showing the newly renovated American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that opens on May 19th.  Beautiful!  I’m not sure when they took those pictures…it’s been raining non-stop in New York for days!

There’s an enjoyable article titled “On the Path of Walker Evans” by Laura Holson in the Escapes section of The New York Times today.  The author travels through the small towns in Alabama where Evans, during the depression era, took photographs that offer poignant social commentary from that period.

The slideshow that accompanies this article contains ”Roadside Stand near Birmingham,” pictured above.  As I was viewing this image, I was so focused on the boys lifting watermelons and text covering the building in the foreground that for minutes I didn’t notice the little girl posing inside the dimly-lit doorway.

There’s an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC right now (mentioned in the article) that attempts to link Evans’s artistic inspiration with the postcards he collected.  It’s a small show, but honestly the sheer number of postcards hanging on the wall makes it impossible to view them all without going blurry-eyed.  The postcard displays sort of overwhelm the few Evans photographs being exhibited…but it’s worth visiting if you’re a big black and white photo fan.