At Christie’s Post War to Present sale on Tuesday, the first lot offered was for a charming and subtle picture, Lois Dodd’s Reflection of the Barn (1971). The work, a frame-within-a-frame painting that depicts an almost Magritte-esque image of a fragmented barn seen though a closed window with sheer white curtains on the outside, carried a modest estimate of between $60,000 and $80,000. By the end of a fierce tug-of-war between two bidders, the painting sold for $378,000, nearly five times its high estimate.
(All prices reported include fees and the buyer’s premium.)
It was an impressive result for the 95-year-old painter, one that Christie’s seemed to anticipate by putting the Dodd painting at the top of the sale. It’s not the first time they’ve done so. Earlier this year, during the house’s Post War to Present sale in March, another Dodd work, Green Door and Bed (1994), took the auction’s premier slot and was also a great success, selling for $239,400 on the same estimate as Reflection of the Barn. Those two works mark the two highest prices ever paid for a Dodd at auction.
In fact, the past few years have been very good for Dodd’s market, especially when it comes to her larger works, of which, according to her gallery, Alexandre, the artist makes only a handful every year. At Phillips Modern & Contemporary Art Day Sale in May, a picture called Wild Geraniums (1974) brought in $228,600 on a $60,000 to $80,000 estimate. In 2021, at Hindman’s Post War & Contemporary Art sale, Window Reflections, Yellow House (2001) earned $31,250 on estimate of $4,000 to $6,000.
Green Door and Bed (1994)
“Lois has been very much under the radar for most of her career,” Phil Alexandre, Dodd’s art dealer since 2003, told ARTnews. The gallery has done a show of Dodd’s work about every two years, he said, with a consistently strong response. Still, Dodd has been regularly overshadowed by artists like Alex Katz and Jane Freilicher, her one-time compatriots at Fischbach Gallery, where she and they first came to prominence. Part of that, according to Alexandre, is because Dodd has very little interest in the market.
“These are all unique paintings,” Alexandre said. “She doesn’t do a series. She doesn’t let one work’s success influence another work. Really, she just paints for herself. I think she has really benefited from the overall reassessment of underappreciated or overlooked women artists. She is finally getting the market recognition she deserves, despite her ambition.”
Part of that success may also be due to recent institutional support. Last year “Lois Dodd: Natural Order” opened at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Connecticut, which was introduced by a lengthy New York Times profile.
“Dodds is one of those artists that we’ve seen increasing prices for in the past few years and we have a lot of faith in her market,” Julian Ehrlich, head of Tuesday’s sale at Christie’s told ARTnews. “And with every great price we make in the market, more great works come out of collections, so we are excited to see what comes next.”
In a 2003 essay for the catalog of Dodd’s first show at Alexandre, John Yau wrote, “It’s never outrageous to state the obvious: The seventy-five year old painter Lois Dodd has never received her due.”
It might be time for an updated essay.
