A slew of sales of fine jewelry is taking place over the next week, at auction houses Bonhams, Christie’s and Sotheby’s, in Hong Kong, London, and New York — just in time for the holidays and gift-giving season.

A collection of Art Deco treasures by Cartier— including an enamel and gem-set tiger bangle and ring suite, circa 1965 — are just some highlights of Bonhams’ ‘Fine Jewelry’ sale on December 4 on New Bond Street, where three lots boast royal provenance, having formerly been in the collection of Her Royal Highness The Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowden.

Similar highlights await at Bonhams New York’s ‘Fine Jewelry’ sale, four days later, on December 8. Look out for lots like a Cartier belle époque natural pearl and diamond bracelet, circa 1915, or a rare antique Renaissance Revival suite of sapphire, demantoid garnet and enamel jewelry by Louis Comfort Tiffany for Tiffany & Co., circa 1920.

Meanwhile, all eyes will be on Christie’s 'Magnificent Jewels' auction on December 10 in New York. On offer will be more than 300 lots, ranging from rare, colored and colorless diamonds, giant gemstones, natural pearls, signed and period jewels, from iconic jewelers as Boivin, Boucheron, Bulgari, Cartier, Fouquet, Graff, Harry Winston, JAR, Tiffany & Co., and Van Cleef & Arpels. The two-session auction includes prices ranging from $1,000 to an eye-popping $10 million.

To see BLOUIN Lifestyle’s picks from these auctions, click on the slideshow.

Walking the aisles of Expo Chicago, Ron Pizzuti is thinking about Roxy Paine. But it’s not the buzz from the artist’s September opening at Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York that has his cogs turning. He can imagine one of Paine’s outdoor metal pieces in his native Columbus, Ohio’s Goodale Park, which faces the stately, limestone-clad former office building that houses the Pizzuti Collection, a private museum the collector and his wife, Ann, unveiled to the public a year ago. A supporter of Madison Square Park’s sculpture program in New York, Pizzuti, a real estate developer, envisions the large patch of Midwestern green as a civic showplace for art—another component of an arts district that will soon be home to the Joseph, a hotel with an extensive art program produced in association with le Méridien, its corporate parent. Fortunately, Expo Chicago offers a concise overview of Paine’s oeuvre, including a blobular polyethylene table sculpture from 2007 and a vitrine displaying a lifelike plant branch in the booth of Kavi Gupta Gallery.

For its part, Boesky’s stand features another Paine vitrine housing an abstracted metal branch, but Pizzuti is interested in a work installed in the closet. Behind the closed door, he takes a second look at a work on paper, a lyrical ink drawing offering nearly didactic insight into the artist’s process. Pizzuti asks gallery director Ricky Manne what he thinks of the piece. “I like that drawing,” says Manne.

“Yeah,” says Pizzuti, “I think I like it enough to—”

“Take it,” finishes Manne, with only the slightest question in his voice.

“Don’t tell Ann,” Pizzuti says with a chuckle. “I promised her I wouldn’t buy anything.”

In truth, Pizzuti enjoys the unwavering support of his wife, with whom he celebrated 50 years of marriage the night after the Pizzuti Collection’s dazzling debut. For the boldface-name-studded opening, the gracious galleries, elegantly repurposed by Miami-based architecture firm Arquitectonica, offered two exhibitions from their personal holdings. The first, “Cuban Forever,” showcased works by Yoan Capote, Raúl Cordero, Raúl Martínez, Enrique Martínez Celaya, Douglas Peréz, and 19 other Cuban national or Cuban-American practitioners whom Pizzuti has patronized. “Part of what we were trying to do was put together a show where you didn’t think about the fact that the work was made by Cubans, but could take the objects on formal issues alone,” says Ron, who refines ideas with the museum’s director, Rebecca Ibel.

The other show to launch the PC, as insiders call the 18,000-square-foot museum, was “The Inaugural Exhibition,” 
a sentimental journey that guided viewers through the process, spanning more than 40 years, by which the Pizzutis became 
art world luminaries, fixtures on the country’s top collector lists. It included works by John Chamberlain, Dave Cole, Jean Dubuffet, Carroll Dunham, Leandro Erlich, Darío Escobar, Ori Gersht, David Hammons, Guillermo Kuitca, Josiah Mcelheny, Louise Nevelson, and Ai Weiwei. “Ron’s very passionate about the individual pieces,” says Ibel of that show. “Many came straight from his living room.”

Designed by the late Charles Gwathmey, the couple’s Columbus high-rise residence has a living-room ceiling that soars some 25 feet. There is a tasteful composition of designer furniture, including a custom sideboard by Gwathmey himself. Glass pieces by notable 20th-century artisans, such as Lino Tagliapietra and Giles Bettison, mingle with tabletop 3-D works by Willem de Kooning and Mickalene Thomas. And Ibel isn’t kidding about objects from the couple’s walls heading to shows at the PC. A monumental 82-by-118- inch oil on canvas by Albert Oehlen came down from its perch over the mantel for inclusion in the museum’s sophomore-year effort, “Now-ism,” an investigation of abstraction produced after 2001. It has been replaced by a portrait by Kehinde Wiley.

Swapping the work of an accomplished 60-year-old with that of a 37-year-old coming into his own is a typical move for the Pizzutis, who draw great pleasure from identifying artists early in their careers, observing them, possibly meeting them, and maybe even building friendships, such as those they have long enjoyed with Frank Stella and Jim Hodges. “It’s amazing to observe the intensity of emerging artists and see how their work is initially inspired and then how it changes,” says Ron.

“We started buying Jim Hodges very early on,” adds Ann. “We loved having his art in our house so much that we never cared if nobody else ever owned anything by him. So it’s been really fun to watch 
his career grow and see how the work, which we’ve always loved, has become so well respected.” A touring Hodges retrospective, “Give More than You Take,” is currently on view at the Hammer Museum of Art in Los Angeles, after stops at the Dallas Museum of Art,
 the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the ICA Boston. His Constellation of an Ordinary Day, 2002, a playful composition of colored lightbulbs on two wood panels, hangs in “Now-ism.”

That sense of discovery is what led Ron to diverge from touring cathedrals to exploring museums during his frequent trips to Europe as a retail buyer in the early 1970s. The looking and learning translated into his first acquisition, a print by Karel Appel. “People have big eyes today and worry too much about buying art for profit, which is something we’ve never done,” he says. “Buy what you like and your tastes may change. I still like that print, by the way.” These days, the Pizzutis visit gallery shows and other collectors’ homes to broaden their education. Calls to three private collections in Bogotá resulted in their purchasing works by Colombian artist Miler Lagos. Still, Ann believes some native talent is at play. “It really does help if you have the gift of an aesthetic eye,” she says of Ron.

Brett Gorvy, chairman of postwar and contemporary art 
at Christie’s and a close friend of the couple, agrees with Ann’s assessment. “The collection is interesting because they don’t simply buy the expected pieces, even by artists who have very signature styles,” he says. “Ron really trusts his own eye, and that makes for
 a wonderfully distinctive collection.”

The ability to choose from a selection of atypical pieces is useful for curating exhibitions. The three or so yearly shows at the Pizzuti Collection are drawn from works and objects already held by the couple. In addition to “Now-ism,” the PC has mounted an exhibition of films by Israeli photographer Ori Gersht and a show of pieces 
by Brazilian designers Humberto and Fernando Campana for the current season.

Like “The Inaugural Exhibition,” “Now-ism” was born from a bit of nostalgia. “I’m going back home,” says Ron. “I went through a period when I became a Minimalist and fell in love with Donald Judd.” The collection is evidence of the collector’s varied interests in historical movements along with new developments in art practice. “But abstraction was an early interest of ours, and one that continues,” he says. Of course, such a broad topic requires some winnowing. By acknowledging the couple’s interest in new work, Ibel and Pizzuti came up with a concept that draws a line between a 40-year-old interest and the most contemporary of works. Examples by 51 artists were chosen from the couple’s storage facility in Columbus as well as the apartment, one gallery hall of which may be used as a staging area for future PC exhibitions.

Acquisitional accidents might find redemption on the museum walls as well. Although Vertigo (Sotto in su), 2007, an ethereal, three-dimensional hanging work of cut polished aluminum by Teresita Fernández, promises to be a “Now-ism” showstopper, it’s the first time the Pizzutis have installed it since its purchase. “It never quite worked in the house,” remarks Ron.

Renowned curator and Yale University School of Art dean Robert Storr, who was in Columbus this fall for the unveiling of “Trans-figurations: Modern Masters From the Wexner Family Collection,” an exhibition he organized at the Wexner Center for the Arts, was eager to discuss the artists of “Now-ism” with the collector. “I thought he’d just be polite and offer a small compliment,” says Ron. It was a satisfying moment.

“This show fell together in a really interesting way, and I have to give so much credit to Rebecca,” he continues. “I have strong ideas, and she sees so many connections, so much compatibility within the collection itself.”

Although exhibitions planned through 2016 are to be drawn from current holdings, it’s possible that ideas for formal exhibitions could inspire future purchases. “It’s starting to permeate my subconscious,” Pizzuti admits, but he doesn’t want to spoil the fun he’s already having. In the meantime, he’ll keep looking for his own next big thing.

A version of this article appears in the November 2014 issue of Art + Auction magazine.

— LaBoeuf Assaulted Mid-Show: In an interview with Dazed magazine — which, for the record, included an hour-long GoPro-documented staring contest between Shia LaBoeuf and reporter Aimee Cliff— the actor revealed that a female visitor to his performance art piece “#IAMSORRY,” which was held at Cohen Gallery in Los Angeles last February, “whipped my legs for 10 minutes and then stripped my clothing and proceeded to rape me.” Though speculation surged, LaBoeuf’s collaborators have confirmed his story on Twitter: “As soon as we were aware of the incident starting to occur, we put a stop to it and ensured that the woman left,” said Nastja Säde Rönkkö, while Luke Turner confirmed that “She ran out, rather than simply walking away.” [Dazed, WP, Time]

— ICA Miami Gets New Building: The new institution’s 37,500-square-foot building will be located in Miami’s Design District thanks to a major donation from local car dealers turned philanthropists Irma and Norman Braman — which, according to a recent study, conforms to the pattern of museums succeeding post-recession by courting such massive private donations. Meanwhile, Art Basel director Marc Spiegler asserted that “Patronage is volatile, and the most avant-garde spaces struggle for profits and prominence,” by way of explaining his organization’s partnership with Kickstarter. Still, critics worry that the prevalence and success of crowdfunding might further disincentivize government contributions to the arts. [NYT, Barrons, FT]

— Snitzer Slams Miami Basel: Miami art dealer Fredric Snitzer came out swinging in a New York Times piece about the “failed promise” of Art Basel Miami Beach: “If Art Basel had to depend on local sales, they never would have stayed.” [NYT]

— Gurlitt Art List Posted: After the Kunstumuseum Bern announced its official decision to accept the controversial collection of Cornelius Gurlitt, the museum has released a list of the 1,280 works — including 250 now officially marked as almost surely looted, such as Pissarro’s “View of Paris.” [LAT, WP, NYT]

— Chan’s Satiric Ferguson Response: Hugo Boss prizewinner Paul Chan’s publishing house Badlands Unlimited put out a series of book cover mock-ups protesting the decision not to indict police officer Darren Wilson in the death of Michael Brown — see: “Ham Sandwiches Are Easier to Indict Than Cops in America by Guy Fieri.” [Art in America]

— FIFA Officials Bribed with Art: Union of European Football Associations president Michel Platini and his fellow FIFA board member Michel D’Hooghe both allegedly received valuable artwork — possibly even a Picasso for Platini — in return for a vote to host the 2018 World Cup in Russia. [CNN, Art Market Monitor]

— Camille Norment will represent Norway at the Venice Biennale. [Artforum]

— “Through My Lens,” a project hosted by the Bowery Mission, showcases 41 photographs taken by New York City’s homeless. [DNAinfo]

— San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum needs a snappy nickname for its 3,000-year-old Chinese rhino sculpture. [SFAppeal]

ALSO ON ARTINFO

Collector Profile: Ron and Ann Pizzuti

How to Light a Show: Liz Deschenes Turns the Gallery Into a Camera

Irreverence and Manifestos: German Collective "Zero" at the Guggenheim

Check our blog IN THE AIR for breaking news throughout the day.

PALM SPRINGS — For a small town surrounded by desert, Palm Springs attracts a great many tourists. Visitors flock to the Southern California town for its climate, dramatic landscape, and wealth of modernist architecture. The new Architecture and Design Center, a branch of the Palm Springs Museum of Art that opened in November along the town’s main thoroughfare, will be another draw, with its program of wide-ranging exhibitions and regular tours of local historic buildings. And it also serves another, complementary, function that is readily apparent in the inaugural exhibition, “An Eloquent Modernist: E. Stewart Williams, Architect”: to advocate for local designers whose work is often overshadowed by that of the mid-century juggernauts who built here.

Palm Springs has the highest concentration of mid-century modern buildings in the world. Prominent landmarks include Richard Neutra’s 1946 Kaufmann Desert House, defined by its low, horizontal planes that contrast with the undulating outline of mountains in the background, and John Lautner’s 1973 Bob Hope Residence, infamous for its curved concrete shell roof. Many other structures by world-famous architects were built here between the late 1940s and the late 1970s, when Palm Springs served as a glamorous weekend retreat for the Hollywood elite. Yet the popular narrative about this kind of modernist architecture doesn’t really belong to Palm Springs alone. Neutra and Lautner are even more famous for their residences two hours north in Los Angeles. 

E. Stewart Williams never developed a major international profile. He did, however, become the single most prolific Palm Springs architect of the post-war period, designing some of the most significant civic structures and houses in town, eventually wielding more influence than any other contemporary architect over its built environment. Proof of his ubiquity can be found on the museum’s street, South Palm Canyon Drive, where Stewart Williams built three respective bank buildings in the span of several blocks. One of them, designed for the Santa Fe Western Savings Bank, now houses the Architecture and Design Center.

The Center is thus an homage to Stewart Williams, both inside and out, with his original façade dutifully restored by the Los Angeles firm Marmol Radziner and a biographical exhibition documenting his lifework in the restored interior. “We made small adjustments that protect the original character of the building,” explains Leo Marmol, a pioneer in the restoration of desert modernist structures who led the much-lauded 1998 restoration of Neutra’s Kaufmann House with partner Ron Radziner. Their firm restored the distinctive iron grillwork on the building’s western façade and interior, reinforced stairway banisters with glass to bring them up to contemporary construction code standards, and planted native desert landscaping around the building’s perimeter — all of which had fallen into disrepair when the structure languished in the years after its bank moved out.

The structure serves as an essential part of the Architecture and Design Center’s inaugural show. “There’s a conversation going on between the exhibition and the building,” explains Architecture and Design Center curator Sidney Williams, the architect’s daughter-in-law. The furniture, drawings, scale models, and photographs on view trace Williams’s development from his days as an architecture student at Cornell and the University of Pennsylvania in the 1920s and 1930s through to his mature work in Palm Springs on structures of civic significance, like the Palm Springs Museum of Art building. Though Stewart Williams was educated in the Beaux-Arts academic style of his youth, a late-1930s trip through Northern Europe introduced him to modernism, which he brought to the palm desert when he moved there in the mid-1940s to open an architecture firm with his father and brother. 

Pieces of furniture designed by Alvar Aalto and displayed in “An Eloquent Modernist,” sourced from the first apartment Stewart Williams shared with his Swedish wife Mari in Palm Springs, point to the origins of his career-long interest in adapting modernism to desert environs. This influence is further evident in Julius Shulman’s photographs of Stewart Williams’s buildings, including the 1954 Edris House, wherein the flat overhang roof sits above native rock that forms the home’s landscaping. Despite the international proliferation of modernism, Stewart Williams brought a distinctly local sensibility to his Palm Springs buildings by integrating the brush, desert, and mountains of the area. “He was very regional in all his work,” explains Williams, the curator. “You get a clear repetition of form and that creates a sense of serenity.”

At the Cannes Film Festival in 1992, Robert Altman was in a typically bad mood. During an outspoken interview with members of the press, the director took a series of verbal shots at the Dutch television producer Ludi Boeken, allegedly calling him a “thief, liar, and pimp.” The two had worked together two years earlier on “Vincent & Theo,” a conventional biopic of the Van Gogh brothers that sparked little critical or commercial interest. A month after his comments showed up in the trade papers, Boeken sued Altman for slander, seeking damages of over $800 million.

It was a fitting burnout to a decade rife with professional disasters for Altman, whose work will be shown in a retrospective at MoMA December 3 through January 17. The director had built up a reputation a decade prior as a challenging personality making equally challenging pictures inside the studio system. Following the critical swelling around “M*A*S*H” (1970) — most of it from the pen of New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael — he emerged as a progenitor of the New Hollywood, along with directors such as Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola, producing a string of idiosyncratic pictures throughout the ’70s that defied a clear unifying logic — the snowy Western “McCabe and Mrs. Miller,” the laconic Raymond Chandler adaptation “The Long Goodbye,” the satirical odyssey “Nashville,” and the hypnotically-paced “3 Women” were all made within a few years of each other. He capped the decade with 13 films, which means he essentially never stopped working.

Then “Popeye” (1980) happened. Altman’s musical based on the comic strips of E. C. Segar (as opposed to the subsequent cartoons by Max Fleischer) is certainly one of the more bizarre films in his career and because of that one of his most fascinating. According to the cartoonist and screenwriter Jules Feiffer, as told to Mitchell Zuckoff in his oral biography of Altman, the movie had its origins in a petty grievance. The producer Robert Evans was upset that he lost the rights to make “Annie” into a musical motion picture, so he went looking for another comic strip to adapt, finally realizing that Paramount happened to own the rights to the character of Popeye. Dustin Hoffmann was originally attached to star, and a slew of directors — Hal Ashby, Louis Malle, Jerry Lewis — were considered to take on the film but ultimately passed. Altman, ever the one to defy expectations, signed a contract to make the picture.

According to various reports, the making of the movie was a disaster. Altman insisted on shooting the film in Malta, reportedly to get as far away from the studio heads as possible. There are multiple accounts of an open bar being set up during the viewing of dailies. One of the crew members fell four floors and remarkably survived. The budget moved from $13 million to $20 million. It earned an international total of $60 million, which means it was more financially successful than John Huston’s version of “Annie” (1982), but due to bloated predictions from the business end and the dissemination of backstage drama in the press, the film was deemed a failure. It would take Altman over a decade to recover.

But the lost period of his long career, essentially the span between “Popeye” and the release of “The Player” (1992), deserves more attention. Altman had trouble raising money for a film, and producers didn’t want to work with him because of his increasing petulance and reputation for calling them out in the press when things didn’t work out to his liking. This meant that the filmmaker known for increasing inflation of narrative simply for the sake of it —“A Wedding” (1978) had 48 characters, which was exactly double the 24 characters in “Nashville” — had to scale back.

Altman followed his biggest picture with one of his smallest. “Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean,” was based on a play written by Ed Graczyk, which Altman had directed on Broadway before turning it into a movie. A group of women — played by Sandy Dennis, Cher, Karen Black, Sudie Bond, and Kathy Bates — reconvene in an old Woolworth’s store they used to spend time at as teenagers as members of a James Dean fan club. The entire film takes place in one room, making it essentially not much different than the play. But on screen the intimacy of these characters is more deeply felt outside the distance of the stage.

With little commercial success, Altman focused his attention on plays. Over the next few years he would film David Rabe’s “Streamers” (1983), Donald Freed’s startlingly minimalist “Secret Honor” (1984), Sam Shepard’s “Fool for Love” (1985), and Christopher Durang’s “Beyond Therapy” (1987). Made for little money, they are often forgotten or completely ignored in critical revaluations. But they contradict a major myth concerning Altman; mainly that he didn’t care about actors. These are films that are all about the performances — there’s often little else on screen — and there seems to be an attempt on Altman’s part to capture the immediacy of the stage combined with the emotional ambiguity of film through camera work. So a scene in a play that’s dramatic intent is bald-faced, often needed in the theater because of its unique relationship with the audience, is complicated by Altman zooming into a small detail in the corner of the frame. It takes the exactitude of theatrical convention, where there is little room for uncertainty, and mucks it up.

With the success of “The Player,” Altman would go back to his early days of voluminous works that often seemed so simply for the sake of it. There are a few interesting pictures during the final part of his career — especially his final film, “A Prairie Home Companion” (2006), more emotional in the wake of his death — but ultimately he had become a legacy director whose new work was praised because of the career that came before it. For a director who is routinely championed for what he brought that was new to the cinema, it’s only correct that we shine a light on the true innovations that are hiding in the shadows.

Art Basel Miami Beach opened to the public on Thursday, but for those who can’t make it, our minute-long-tour may be the next best thing.

MIAMI BEACH — “Go Ahead and Jump”: so says the large-scale text painting by Joe Wardwell that greets visitors entering Pulse’s new beachside tent, and so does the fair’s 10th edition seem to embrace this spirit head on with a leap into fresh territory. This year marks both a geographic shift from the Ice House in Miami proper to midway up Miami Beach, and with it, a conceptual revamp courtesy of new director Helen Toomer, former director of the Collective Design Fair and founder of Manhattan’s now shuttered Toomer Labzda gallery — who was shopping the fair right alongside collectors at Thursday’s preview.

“I worked with Helen when she was the associate director of this fair back in the day, and I kept up with her program when she had her gallery, and I really wanted to support her,” said LA gallerist Walter Maciel, who had intended to move on from Pulse permanently before Toomer’s return and has now split his presentations this week between his solo booth at the fair for collage artist Tm Gratkowski and a mixed booth at Miami Project.

Notable changes to Pulse include a roster slimmed from more than 100 exhibitors in past years to its current 71, which features emerging — or “Impulse” — galleries like New York’s Junior Projects mixed in with veteran exhibitors. And though Pulse will host a special “Artists’ Morning” from 10 a.m. to noon on Friday, a number of featured artists were already present on Thursday. Susie Ganch stood alongside her flowing, geometric work revealed up close to be made from Starbucks lids at Sienna Patti Contemporary, while David Magnusson elucidated the story behind his muted father-daughter portraits documenting participants in conservative Christian “Purity Balls.” “I wanted to photograph a series of portraits meant to be so beautiful that the girls and their dads themselves could be proud of the pictures in the same way that they were proud of their decisions,” he explained, remarking that his own initial attitudes toward the abstinence-based ritual began to unexpectedly change the more he delved into the project.

Photography is not in short supply at the fair, making up an estimated 25 percent of works shown. At Berlin’s Wagner+Partner, the turned backs of wan figures in Erwin Olaf’s “Keyhole Series” sit juxtaposed to Ruud van Empel’s lush head-on portraits. Meanwhile, Tokyo’s MA2 Gallery turned its booth into a black box, the better to show Ken Matsubara’s pairings of archival photos from Coney Island with his video works shot in the same location in present day.

Perhaps owing to Toomer’s onetime home turf, the fair has a strong New York showing, with 18 of the exhibitors venturing down from the Big Apple. Winkleman Gallery, for example, delivered another New York before-and-after with Jennifer Dalton’s wall-spanning grid of photographs documenting change in Williamsburg buildings. And even at Boston’s Miller Yezerski Gallery, Nathalie Miebach’s bright, whimsical multimedia sculptures used data from New York’s weather patterns to visualize the wreckage of amusement park rides resulting from Hurricane Sandy — one of which, 2014’s “The Wavy Jane,” sold fast for an undisclosed price.

Alongside all of the artist-driven fare was some good old tongue-in-cheek art world commentary, none more blatant than the solo booth of Lisa Levy’s text paintings at Schroeder Romero, sporting phrases like “Welcome to the home of one truly smart, sexy art collector” and “You probably could have made this, but you didn’t” in a simple white sans serif. Meanwhile, over at Davidson Contemporary sits “The Center of Convention,” a dizzying installation by duo Ghost of a Dream made up entirely of debris collected in the wake of art fairs — signs, carpeting, crates, and various shades of blue tape patterned into diagonals — meant to convey the “energy of overstimulation” that so often saturates fairs like Basel, Frieze, and the Armory Show, according to co-creator Adam Eckstrom. “I think it’s one of the most overwhelming things as you walk around an art fair — everything’s catching your eyes and competing for attention,” agreed co-creator Lauren Was. And indeed, this fresh edition of Pulse is no exception.

MIAMI BEACH — Despite what might be attributed to art market exhaustion after a stunning year of record breaking auction and art fair sales mixed with more recent headline grabbing news about sacked auction house CEOs, the 13th edition of Art Basel Miami Beach soldiered on with solid sales.

The action was brisk at Los Angeles’s Regen Projects as Glenn Ligon’s text dense “Come Out Study #15” from 2014, in silk screen on canvas, sold to an American collector for $200,000. Ligon is currently the subject of a major exhibition at London’s Camden Center and this work hails from that same series on view.

From another time and installed in cinematic-like style at Zurich’s Galerie Gmurzynska, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary, a rare and recently unearthed Pablo Picasso fresco from 1918, “Venus Et Amour,” formerly in the collection of Warhol business manager Frederick Hughes, sold for around $1 million to an American collection. Gmurzynska also sold two large-scale Robert Indiana paintings in oil on homasote from 1959, “Golden Orbs with Chevrons” and “Golden Circles,” at the identical asking price of $1.7 million.

Though it wasn’t officially for sale, the gallery hung a Kazimir Malevich masterpiece from 1917, “Dissolution of Form,” considered to be the most important Suprematist work after the “Black Square.” It is fresh from a blockbuster Malevich showing at Tate Modern. “Normally, you just don’t bring that sort of thing to an art fair,” said Mathias Rastorfer, a Gmurzynska partner. Think north of $60 million if the Malevich carried a price tag.

Of course, ABMB isn’t about Modern masterpieces, but dwells on more contemporary turf, which has grown more conservative as the fair enters its teenage years. Perhaps one exception, a notable one at that, was a stand-alone installation at Paris/Cologne Karsten Greve, with works by the 34-year-old Irish artist Claire Morgan. Though the stand had its share of multi-million dollar Louise Bourgeois and Cy Twombly works, Morgan’s stunning boxes were priced and sold in the $40,000 range, including “Be careful what your wish for” from 2014, consisting of a taxidermied Jackdaw set in a deadly nest of torn, colored polythene nylon and encased in a glass cabinet.

“We want to see culture as an important part of life,” said gallery founder Karsten Greve in a philosophical moment amidst the swirl of commercial action, “and give people an idea to think they might have a vision about something.” Greve should know since he showcased works by Twombly, similar to the one that sold last month at Christie’s for a record $70 million, for $9,000 decades ago. “People thought I was crazy.”

Things looked rosy at New York’s Van de Weghe Fine Art, as a late large-scale 120 by 80 ¼ inch Jean-Michel Basquiat, “Reok” from 1985-86, in acrylic and oil stick on canvas, sold in the region of the $5.9 million asking price. An early and energetic Basquiat work on paper from 1982 sold to another buyer in the region of the $1.2 million asking price, while a rather sensational Keith Haring, “Self-Portrait” from 1987, depicting the artist in large-framed glasses, sold for around $550,000.

Speaking about the Basquiat painting, gallery founder Christophe van de Weghe said, “I never met him before. All the guys who bought from me yesterday [during the V.I.P. preview] were in their 30s and 40s. It’s a new world,” noted the dealer, “and they’re all new clients.”

Price points were at lower altitudes at New York’s Mary Boone Gallery as a wall hogging Barbara Kruger digital print on vinyl, “Untitled (Blind Idealism is Deadly)” from 2013, sold for around $250,000. The gallery also sold a compelling figure painting by Liu Xiaodong, “My Hometown” from 2014, depicting a group of young people traipsing along an ugly landscape, at an asking price of $125,000, and Will Cotton’s frothy “Elle with Cupcakes,” also from 2014 and measuring 36 by 24 inches, at an asking price of $85,000.

“I wrote 10 invoices yesterday,” said Mary Boone.

You never know what you might run into or admire at this fair, and several works stood out at New York’s Michael Rosenfeld Gallery. Iconic furniture maker Harry Bertoia’s delicate and other-worldly mobile, “Untitled (Cloud)” in bronze coated wire from circa 1955, sold in the low six figures and Alma Thomas’s color-charged “Lunar Rendezvous-Circle of Flowers” from 1960 sold to an otherwise unidentified institution in the high six figures, according to gallerist Michael Rosenfeld.

Along the Appian Way-like aisles of ABMB it’s hard not to run into familiar art world figures. That was the case as Montreal collector Francois Odermatt paused at a stand and whipped out his cracked-glass smart phone to show off a recent purchase. It was a Hannah Wilke drawing that he had just acquired from London’s Alison Jacques for $90,000. Previously unaware of Wilke’s work, Odermatt said he spotted Christie’s post-war specialist Brett Gorvy at Jacques, who told him that he owned four works by the artist and thought she was fantastic. The affirmation gave Odermatt confidence to pull the trigger. “Sometimes, you want to go on your own path,” said the collector.

Along those lines, a European collector at New York’s Paula Cooper Gallery bought Tauba Auerbach’s “Slice/Wave Fulgurite III” from 2014, a rather extraordinary object in African cichlid sand, sandbox sand, red jasper, glass frit, azurite, resin, glass, and a spray lacquered wooden plinth for $70,000. Another collector snagged Auerbach’s “Prism Scan I,” a set of 13 C-prints from an edition of three for $30,000. The gallery also sold one of Christian Marclay’s “Actions: Floppp Silurp Spaloosh Whoomph (No.5)” from 2013, a 62 by 103 inch screenprint and acrylic on canvas in the $400,000 range.

Anyone who travels to art fairs on a regular or addicted basis notices certain works that reappear. That was a case in point at New York’s Mnuchin Gallery, where a brawny and eye-catching John Chamberlain, “Miss Remember Ford” from 1964, sold for around $3 million. “We had it in Basel in June,” said gallerist Robert Mnuchin, “but we sold it here in two minutes. What does fresh mean,” queried the dealer in Socratic style, “only that the right person has to see it.”

Mnuchin also sold an early David Hammons abstract painting, “Untitled” from 1969 in enamel on Masonite, for around $300,000 to an American collector, and Mark Bradford’s stunning and large-scale collage “White Girl,” from 2002, for approximately $1.8 million. The gallery also sold Robert Ryman’s petite and heavenly white “Page,” from 1998, for $1.5 million. “We’re actually selling stuff,” exclaimed the dealer.

Another Hammons sold at New York/London Dominique Levy Gallery. That work, “Untitled” from 1989-90, consists of a Louis Vuitton handbag stretched with found black rubber, a shoeshine brush, and metal springs — it sold in the region of $1.5 million.

The gallery also sold a ravishing, thickly painted Kazuo Shiraga abstraction, “Composition Werk BB109” from 1964, for “north of two million,” according to director Lock Kresler.

Nearby, Christopher Wool’s untitled enamel on rice paper work from 1994 sold somewhere in the vicinity of the $1.7 million asking price. “The first person who walked into the booth bought it,” said Kresler.

The fair runs through Sunday.