Henry Kravis, co-founder of the leveraged-buyout firm KKR & Co. LP, has asked Sotheby’s & Co. to auction an Edgar Degas work in his collection estimated to fetch more than $40 million, according to two New York dealers.
Kravis, 64, is selling a Degas pastel of a seated ballerina at Sotheby’s in New York on Nov. 3, according to the dealers, who declined to be named because the information is private. The financier bought the 1879 work, titled “Danseuse au repos”, at Sotheby’s in London in 1999 for $28 million, setting a Degas auction record that has stood since. He has locked in a “guarantee” from Sotheby’s to receive an undisclosed amount regardless of the sale’s outcome.
Kravis declined, through KKR spokesman David Lilly at Kekst & Co., to comment on the sale.
Kravis served on Sotheby’s board from 1997 to 2003 and has periodically sold other works at auction by Henri Matisse, John Singer Sargent and others. Dealers speculated that his taste had moved toward 20th-century modern works, prompting him to prune the 19th-century Degas. Kravis’s wife, Marie-Josee Kravis, is president of the board of trustees at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.
Sotheby’s Nov. 3 impressionist and modern-art sale is projected to tally in excess of $350 million. The sale is led by Russian Kazimir Malevich’s 1916 geometric “Suprematist Composition”, estimated to sell for more than $60 million.
The approaching New York auctions of impressionist and modern works come amid a weakening art market and global financial crisis. Recent contemporary-art auctions in London missed projected totals.
Dealers privately moan that buying has stopped as collectors wait to see if prices will drop in the coming months. Yet other merchants of older art remain optimistic. (Bloomberg)