Exhibit Offers Peek at Christie’s Art Auction

A rare still life by Thomas Hart Benton, a Winslow Homer watercolor and a small Georgia O’Keeffe flower painting are among 21 works of American art on view today in a preview exhibition of a Christie’s New York auction. Eighteen watercolors and paintings and three Western bronzes will be on view from 11:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. in the Maisonette Room at the Beverly Hills Hotel.

The works are highlights from Christie’s $30-million sale of about 300 works of American art to be held Dec. 1. The auction will include 27 works by George Tooker, Paul Cadmus, Edie Nadelman and Gaston Lachaise to be sold for the benefit of the School of American Ballet. A group of Western paintings and sculptures from an anonymous private collection will go on the block in the same sale.

The sampling at the Beverly Hills Hotel includes Benton’s “Still Life With Flowers and Apple” (valued at $100,000 to $150,000), Homer’s “Picking Flowers, Tynemouth” ($300,000 to $500,000) and O’Keeffe’s “Blue Morning Glories” ($400,000 to $600,000). Among other highlights are Fitz Hugh Lane’s landscape, “Annisquam River Heading Toward Ipswich Bay” ($700,000 to $900,000); a Western genre painting, “The Frozen Sheepherder (The Last Watch),” by Frederic Remington ($400,000 to $600,000) and an urban New York scene, “Neighbors,” by precisionist Charles Sheeler ($300,000 to $500,000).

Auction prices for American art have lagged well behind the enormous sums paid for modern and Impressionist paintings. Few American paintings had passed the $1-million mark until a couple of years ago, said Debra Force, head of Christie’s department of American painting. The record price for American art is $8 million, paid in May for a Frederic Church painting, while the $53.9-million price tag for Vincent van Gogh’s “Irises” has set the pace for Impressionism.

But American art prices have escalated at roughly the same pace as more expensive fields, Force said. “The difference is that European and Japanese buyers haven’t developed an interest in American art, which remains a national market,” she said.

American art isn’t being given away, however. Childe Hassam’s “Fourth of July” flag painting is expected to sell for “multimillion dollars” in the Dec. 1 auction, according to a Christie’s spokesman.