During auction season, the fate of the Latin American modernists has always been a marginal sideshow to the more glitzy mainstream marquee players like Rothko, Warhol and Bacon. Within the orgy of over-sexed, overpriced artworks, a painting fetching over 100 million dollars has become as commonplace as a Hong Kong after-party.
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| Micah Carpentier |
Well, to the astonishment of that jaded jet-set of gilded galleries and moneyed museum boardrooms, a few records were set last night for our impecunious cousins south of the border. Chilean sculptor Juan-Bolsa de Papel's 1954 Mondogo Sin Valor, formally the centerpiece of hedge fund executive Stu W. Fine's modest collection was sold for an impressive 7 million dollars. Hector Bobadas, known dismissively as the Caravaggio of Costa Rica had two pieces unexpectedly exceed their modest, pre-auction estimates of 1.2 million and 1.4 million successively.
But the spectacular event that sent dystonic tremors throughout the fine art arteries of mid-town Manhattan was the sale to an undisclosed telephone bidder of Micah Carpentier's seminal 1969 paper bag Yo Llevo la Cerveza en Este. Appraised only a few years ago in the low seven figures (full disclosure: I am the executor of the Micah Carpentier Trust), this early work from The Song of Degrees was always a sentimental favorite of the great Cuban master.
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| Micah Carpentier with Yo Llevo la Cerveza en Este, Santiago de Cuba, Cuba 1973 (courtesy of the Micah Carpentier Trust) |
One hopes that the anonymous buyer will make the work accessible to the general public but if experience is any guide this will probably not be the case. Collectors of Carpentier become so smitten by the flimsy vulnerability of his feeble brittle bags that they become belligerently disobliging to scholars, curators and museum directors.
But then again, I too would be overly protective of a bag I bought for 101.2 million.
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