The Art Market: Dennis Hopper’s art

Christie’s was forced to pull 32 of 288 items in its sale of the Dennis Hopper collection, which went under the hammer in New York this week after Hopper’s fifth and final wife, Victoria Duffy, brought an injunction to prevent the sale of some of the material.

Duffy has been embroiled in a vicious battle with the estate of Easy Rider star Hopper, who filed for divorce shortly before he died last year. In an affidavit filed last year, lawyers for Hopper’s estate accused Duffy of taking $1.5m worth of art from him, including works by Warhol, Robert Graham and Banksy. Duffy’s lawyer denies the allegations. In her injunction, Duffy claimed that the works in Christie’s sale were either hers, or gifted to her, and that she would suffer “irreparable harm” if they are sold. Among the works pulled from sale were British artist Jonathan Yeo’s 2005 “Untitled” portrait of Hopper (estimated at $8,000-$12,000) – one of only three artists who depicted him, the others being Warhol and Schnabel. Christie’s made $1.8m for the “art” section of the Hopper sale; the top price was given for a Warhol Mao with two holes in it from bullets fired by Hopper, which sold for $302,500 over an estimate of $20,000-$30,000.

This week saw the launch of Art Exchange, a “stock exchange for artwork”. The idea is that art galleries, art owners and artists can put their works into the exchange, and punters can buy shares from €10 up, and then watch their shares go up (hopefully) or down. All works are worth more than €100,000, and the number of shares in each artwork corresponds to its price. If one buyer acquires 80 per cent of the value then he or she can force the sale of the remaining 20 per cent and take the work out of the exchange.

The founder is Pierre Naquin, 26, who comes from a collecting and technology background, and it is run from France even though, says director of operations Caroline Matthews, “it has been quite difficult to persuade galleries in France to participate. There is a big difference between the mentality here and in the US or China, where we already have had a lot of interest.” She says the firm has signed up six or seven “well-known” galleries, although will only name two: Yvon Lambert and Galerie Hussenot.

For the moment, just two works are shown at www.aexchange.net: a Francesco Vezzoli print, “The Premiere of a Play That Will Never Run” (€135,000) and a Sol LeWitt painting “Irregular Form” (€100,000), both from Lambert. Matthews says they are not giving details of other works “to keep the suspense”.

Will this work? It is certainly breaking new ground. But Philip Hoffman of the Fine Art Fund is sceptical. “My fund would not buy artworks that had been on an exchange,” he says. “I think people would be wary of buying something that had been offered so publicly.”

‘Sower’ (1924) by Arkady Shishkin

The Russian-financed, London-based gallery Art Sensus is showing a major group of Russian photographs that are being sold by the Tosca Photography Fund. Rodchenko and his Circle, curated by Russian art specialist John Milner, features 650 images – 300 by Rodchenko – and represents about half of the total holdings acquired by the fund between 2007 and 2010.

The fund, which was run by former dealer Zelda Cheatle, closed in October last year, and the photographs are now being sold. Cheatle says she has already made a number of sales and has returned 30 per cent to investors: she predicts an overall return of 29 per cent.

But so historically important is this group that she is being very careful about who she sells to: “I’m absolutely looking at who is buying, I want to be sure buyers will loan and make these images available if necessary,” she says. In the show are many previously unseen images by Rodchenko, illustrating aspects of Russian photography of the time, from propaganda work to photographs from the farthest corners of Soviet Russia. Prices from £1,000-£26,000.

There is a new twist in the bizarre saga of the archives of the Renaissance artist and biographer Giorgio Vasari. These are kept in the house in Arezzo where he was born in 1511. The 31 boxes of documents, including Vasari’s correspondence with Michelangelo and Cosimo I de’ Medici, were sold in 2009 to a mysterious Russian, Vasilij Stepanov, representing a commercial property company, Ross Group, for an astronomical €150m.

The deal immediately set off alarm bells: the Italian art critic Vittorio Sgarbi claimed the documents were only worth about €15m and the sale was “a joke”. The archive was sealed in the house by Italian judges, amid speculation that the Russian deal was designed to push the Italian government into making a strong counter-offer.

Now, however, an Italian court has ordered the removal of the seals, but the sale to the Russians is still stalled and the archive will still not be allowed to leave the country. In a statement, the Italian culture ministry warned: “The release from seizure does not introduce any significant new element, and any further action of the current owners would again be subject to ministerial control, even pre-emption.” The Italian press reported that in the case of pre-emption the ministry would offer a substantially lower price.

Georgina Adam is editor-at-large of The Art Newspaper