A painting by Marlene Dumas sold for $9 million at Art Basel Miami Beach, according to David Zwirner gallery, which represents the highly touted South African artist.
The price for The Schoolboys (1986–87) marks a new personal high for Dumas, in terms of what market observers can track. When it comes to her auction track record, the high of $6.3 million was established back in 2008.
It’s the latest big-ticket item sold at the fair, which kicked off to the drumbeat of a $20 million sale by Hauser & Wirth during the VIP opening on Tuesday. Gagosian has already sold upwards of 60 works for more than $35 million, including a major Richter painting from 1982 that carried a $12.5 million asking price.
Although it’s unclear what the final selling price for that Richter was, it means that the Dumas—which was touted as the highest-priced work to sell on Thursday—is not the second most expensive work that has been reported sold at the fair, but the third.
And that’s with two days still to go. A painting by Frank Stella, with the asking price of $45 million, remains unsold at Yares Art.
Galleries often broadcast sales such as these as a marketing tool to generate publicity. What makes David Zwirner’s announcement of the Dumas transaction particularly noteworthy is that it comes six months after the gallery took a public stance against revealing private sales at art fairs.
Atmosphere during Art Basel Miami Beach Art Fair 2023 VIP Preview at the Miami Convention Center on December 06, 2023 in Miami, Florida. (Photo by Sean Zanni/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images)
“David Zwirner took the surprise decision not to disclose prices on secondary-market sales made this year, and reported to press that he would no longer do so going forward,” Artnet’s Naomi Rea reported from Art Basel in June. At the time, the gallery featured secondary-market paintings by Joan Mitchell, Marlene Dumas, Gerhard Richter, and Agnes Martin.
A representative for David Zwirner didn’t immediately respond to an email seeking comment about the change of strategy.
“I believe that it is the gallery’s responsibility to look after the best interests of our consignors,” Zwirner told the Art Newspaper in June. “We have a responsibility to our clients to value their privacy and to appreciate when they choose to sell through the gallery versus taking the works to auction.”
This particular Dumas painting, The Schoolboys, returned to the market 15 years after it first appeared, when it fetched $1.8 million at Christie’s in London in 2011, according to the Artnet Price Database. At the time, it was sold by Museum Gouda, which owned it, to raise money for its acquisition fund.
The work is part of a small group of portraits, primarily of schoolchildren, that Dumas painted in the late 1980s after moving to the Netherlands. It depicts four teenage boys in striped school uniforms, some sneering, with the composition recalling the group portraits of the 17th century Dutch Golden Age.