Billionaires Are Begging To Buy This Art. Too Bad

Although she resisted it, Vija Celmins has reached the pinnacle of the art market.

- James Tarmy

Jeff Koons, Gerhard Richter, and David Hockney are household names with prices to match. The artist Vija Celmins commands similar prices from a lofty collector base; Henry Kravis, J. Tomilson Hill, and Mitchell and Emily Rales own work by Celmins, as do corporate collections such as those of JPMorgan Chase & Co. and the Cartier Foundation. But in contrast with her peers, you might see her name and ask, “Who?”

“I’m not speaking in any kind of pejorative way, but I’ve always thought of Vija as a niche artist,” says Laurence Shopmaker, co-founder of Senior & Shopmaker Gallery in New York, which will exhibit a group of Celmins’s prints from Sept. 12 to Nov. 2.

That might change after the Met Breuer opens its fall season on Sept. 24 with a 120-object retrospective of her work, the first in more than 25 years. The show, which features many of Celmins’s hyperrealistic drawings, was initially on view in San Francisco and Toronto, where it was met with uniformly positive acclaim. (“Why is this genius artist only now getting a show worthy of her art?” gushed the Washington Post.) Its reception in New York is expected to be similarly rapturous.

“She’s always been recognized as a fantastic artist,” says Met curator Ian Alteveer, “someone curators and critics and artists and a certain group of collectors have loved.” Her paintings sell for upwards of $5 million and drawings for about $1 million, placing Celmins, who’s now 80, at the very top of the contemporary art world and the top of the art market generally. In November one of her drawings, Untitled (Long Ocean #5), from 1972 will come to auction at Christie’s, carrying a high estimate of $2 million.