An Under-Recognized 72-Year-Old Painter Makes Waves at Auction

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Before 2023, Takako Yamaguchi’s work was little-known to market observers, selling mainly in smaller auction houses in the low five figures. But in the past year alone, the 72-year-old Los Angeles–based, Japanese-born artist has seen several of her paintings appear in high-profile sales at bigger auction houses, one of them taking in more than $1 million.

Next week, several of her works will go on the block in evening sales at Christie’s and Sotheby’s, alongside those by fast-rising emerging artists, showing that Yamaguchi’s paintings, some of which are on view in the current Whitney Biennial, have become an unexpected market phenomenon.

At Sotheby’s, an untitled oil and metal-leaf painting from 1998 has an estimate of $400,000 to $600,000. The luminescent dreamlike scene, featuring coral reefs, sea anemones, and pink lotus flowers, has a third-party guarantee.

At Christie’s, Yamaguchi’s oil and bronze-leaf painting Sally and Miu-Miu (1994), showing a woman smoking alongside her cat, has an estimate of $300,000 to $500,000. Christie’s, which has never before auctioned a work by Yamaguchi, has featured the painting in advertisements for its 21st-century art evening sale.

Things had been heating up for Yamaguchi’s market for a few years before her inclusion in the Whitney Biennial. In 2019 she appeared in a Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles exhibition devoted to Pattern & Decoration, a 1970s art movement that drew craft techniques into painting, often as a feminist gesture. (Yamaguchi was among several artists in the show who were not directly tied to the movement.) Acclaimed exhibitions at galleries, including a critically lauded solo show at New York’s Ortuzar Projects last year, followed. And then there’s the current Whitney Biennial.

Several dealers have been supporting Yamaguchi since well before the world’s biggest auction houses sold her work. “I knew from the first time I saw her work, that it would have this huge impact,” Stars Gallery owner Christopher Schwartz told ARTnews. Having done a show with her in 2021, he added, “I didn’t think it was going to happen so quickly.”

“I gave her her first show, I think, in ’83,” dealer Kathryn Markel told ARTnews. “Her work was just beautiful, from Day One.”

Among these dealers, as well as critics and historians, Yamaguchi’s paintings are prized for their precision. She’s worked in a variety of different modes. In 2021 New York’s Ramiken gallery mounted a show of her realistic close-ups of buttoned-up shirts. These look markedly different from the “Smoking Women” paintings, of which the Christie’s Sally and Miu-Miu is a part. Those canvases feature beautiful curves, elaborate garments, and geometric shapes, and incorporate Japanese printmaking techniques and clear references to Art Nouveau and Art Deco; they stand far apart from the sinuous abstractions Yamaguchi is showing at the Biennial.

The “Smoking Women” works are Yamaguchi’s most popular. Fair Warning, an auction app run by former Christie’s rainmaker Loïc Gouzer, listed one this past February with a $500,000–$700,000 estimate. It ended up selling for more than $991,000.

About a month later, Yamaguchi’s auction record blasted past the $1 million mark when Catherine and Midnight (1994) hit the block as Lot 1 during a Sotheby’s London modern and contemporary art evening sale. The 80-inch-wide painting drew a hammer price of approximately $874,000 ($1.11 million with fees), on an estimate of $500,000 to $750,000. (Catherine and Midnight also had a third-party guarantee.)

Tom Jimmerson, director of Los Angeles gallery as-is.la, and Yamaguchi’s longtime husband, said that, “from the market point of view,” the “Smoking Women” paintings are “outliers.” “For reasons that might remain mysterious,” he said, “they generate more desire of ownership, and more excitement.”

Jimmerson told ARTnews that almost all the collectors who bought Yamaguchi’s work as recently as a decade ago were people who knew her personally. While they were not amateurs, they were not people who bid at auctions either.

Her prices were not high at the time. And up to the time of her recent auction records, they remained that way. Markel said that when she sold Yamaguchi’s work to potential buyers in 2009, the price range was $12,000 to $14,000. During the exhibition at Stars Gallery in 2021, that range rose to $20,000 to $30,000—including the untitled painting since consigned to Sotheby’s. “We felt like the market had no idea … what was coming,” Schwartz said.

Past appearances of Yamaguchi’s works at auction bear out that evidence. According to the Artnet price database, Yamaguchi’s serigraphs Quaretto III and Quaretto IV together sold for $1,500 in February 2013, at Weschler’s Auctioneers & Appraisers in Rockville, Maryland. The consigner was the global law firm Dewey & LeBoeuf LLP, which imploded and had to sell off its extensive collection of artworks by figures such as Christopher Wool, Frank Stella, and Sol LeWitt.

Just under a decade later, in December 2022, Palm Beach Modern Auctions sold Yamaguchi’s four-foot-wide painting French Curve 26, #8 for $10,000 on a $3,000–$5,000 estimate, consigned in that case by the Tupperware Brands Corporate Collection in Orlando, Florida, whose holdings totaled more than 800 artworks. (Tupperware acquired the painting in 1980.)

That’s a fraction of the prices Yamaguchi’s work now command on the block. When her painting The Fire Next Time (2004) appeared at Sotheby’s Hong Kong last month, it sold for $260,000 (2 million HKD), on an estimate of approximately $200,000 to $320,000 (1.6 million HKD to 2.5 million HKD).

The Biennial aside, Yamaguchi is still awaiting greater attention from institutions. (Though the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, and other museums now own her works, she has never had a major retrospective.) This may soon change. Yamaguchi is currently represented in New York by Ortuzar Projects, whose clients are predominantly established collectors and museums. “I would think that the support of Ortuzar Projects makes Takako’s work look more serious to buyers than it might have looked otherwise,” Jimmerson said.

“She really needs a museum retrospective to kind of put all these pieces together,” Mike Egan, Ramiken’s founder, told ARTnews. He estimated that the public had only seen 10 percent of her work. “She’s got 40 years of art … really waiting to be discovered.”

Source: artnews.com