Category: Auctions
'Far from stellar'
May 5 2011
That's the New York Times' verdict on Christie's Impressionist and Modern sale held last night in New York. The sale totaled $156m, including buyer's premium, which is some way under the combined low hammer price estimate of $162m, which did not include premium. Sotheby's sale the day earlier totalled more, $170m. Apparently, the day's delay suited Christie's:
Christie’s had a big advantage in its timing. By evaluating the results of the auction season opener, experts there were able to persuade sellers to adjust their expectations accordingly. “They lowered the reserves and got their energy back,” said Abigail Asher, a private Manhattan dealer, referring to the secret minimum price agreed upon by the seller and the auction house.
They say Leonardo di Caprio was spotted in the room.
Yikes - an 'art market slowdown'?
May 5 2011
A work by Egon Schiele will be offered at Sotheby's next month in London with an estimate of £22-30m. More interesting, perhaps, is the headline The Guardian has given the story:
'Rare Egon Schiele painting could buck art market slowdown'.
The auction houses will be hoping for better results than have been seen in the equivalent big sales in New York over the past week. At Christie's on 4 May, $156m of impressionist and modern art was sold, below the total pre-sale estimate of $162m-$232m, with 10 lots failing to sell, including Monet's Iris Mauves.
It was a similar situation at Sotheby's on 3 May, which sold lots for $170m, above the low estimate of $159, but with some notable disappointments. There were 15 unsold lots and the top lot, Picasso's Femmes Lisant (Deux Personnages), sold for below its estimate price.
It seems to only take a few high-profile failures, and suddenly everyone is rushing for the exit. If only the auction houses would learn - if you live by the hyped estimate, then so, according to the inexorable rule of fate, you must die thereby.
Watch a sleeper sell
May 4 2011
Here's a fascinating video of a potential sleeper being sold at auction in Paris. The painting, titled Cinq Personnages de la Comedie Italienne, was catalogued as 'circle of Watteau', with an estimate of EUR 40-60,000. It sold for EUR 1m, excluding buyer's premium.
Here is the original cataloguing. The central figure related to a drawing by Antoine Watteau, but there was also speculation it could be by Jean-Baptiste Pater. Doubtless it'll surface again, and I'll put news of it here if it does.
Sotheby's Impressionist & Modern $170m sale
May 4 2011
Picture: Sotheby's
The headline figures may look spectacular, but there were some interesting prices. The front cover lot, Picasso's Femme Lisant (above), was estimated at $25-35m, but sold for $21.3m including buyer's premium. That means the hammer price was significantly lower than expected (pre-sale estimates do not include premiums), and that the reserve must have been dramatically lowered just before the sale.
Does this mean that a) Sotheby's over-estimated the picture in the first place? or b) the Picasso market has peaked? I think the answer is a). Increasingly, auctioneers are having to place punchy estimates just to get pictures consigned in the first place, and then hope for a single bidder who'll buy at the reserve.
'It's about masturbation'
May 3 2011
Picture: Sotheby's
Excitement is building ahead of Sotheby's 10th May sale of Jeff Koons' Pink Panther ($20-30m). Jeff says it's all 'about masturbation'.
Well worth a few minutes of your time is Sotheby's new video of Koons discussing the sculpture with Tobias Meyer. It opens with the statement that Koons is considered 'one of the most important artists of the 20th Century, together with Warhol and Picasso'. So that's above the likes of Klimt, Miro, Pollock, Rothko, Bacon, Freud etc. Will people watch this in fifty years time, and laugh?
For an alternative - and much more entertaining - view, click here to see the great Robert Hughes interiew Koons.
'Prices have climbed back dramatically'
April 27 2011
Picture: Christie's (detail)
Sotheby's and Christie's have been unveiling highlights of their forthcoming June modern art auctions. Picasso leads the way, and with estimates that seem to be climbing ever higher. From Bloomberg:
Owners of valuable 20th-century trophies have become more confident about selling after record prices last year. Picasso’s 1932 Marie-Therese painting “Nude, Green Leaves and Bust” fetched $106.5 million -- the most for any artwork at auction -- at Christie’s, New York, in May 2010. A simpler portrait of her may fetch as much as $35 million at Sotheby’s New York in May.
“Prices have climbed back dramatically,” David Leiber, director of the New York-based gallery Sperone Westwater, said in an interview. “For the classic works, collectors like the spectacle of buying at auction.”
Can the frenzy possibly last? Perhaps, but as I said a while ago, if you want to be sure of banking a good price for your Picasso, I'd sell it now. On the other hand, if you have an Old Master, I'd keep it - is anything pre-1800 beginning to feel seriously under-valued?
The most engaging picture coming up in June (at Christie's) must be Picasso's Jeune Fille Endormie. It will surely beat its estimate of £9-12million - at least, I hope it does, for, thanks to an anonymous donor, the proceeds are going to medical research at the University of Sydney.
Puntastic
April 27 2011
Picture: Christie's
Sub-editors reached for the puns when Christie's announced that a Francis Bacon triptych self-portrait would be one of the highlights of their 11th May contemporary art sale in New York. Here's two of my favourites:
'Triptych set to bring home the Bacon' - ABC
'Demand for Bacon Sizzles' - The Irish Independent
In the catalogue, the picture is marked 'estimate on request', which is auction-speak for 'if you have to ask the price, you can't afford it'. The picture has been guaranteed to sell by Christie's, with a figure of $20m being mentioned.
China and art - the next bubble?
April 26 2011
Picture: The Atlantic
Derek Thompson in The Atlantic asks if China's phenomenal spending in the art market is taking the form of a bubble, and finds a potential answer from Vikram Mansharamani, author of Boombustology - Spotting Financial Bubbles Before they Burst:
Once again, China has surpassed the United States in a key economic number. No, it's not GDP. It's art. In four years, China has zoomed past us from the world's fourth-biggest fine art scene to the world's largest auction market for art.
...
In the last 20 years, Sotheby's mostly stable stock has experienced four sharp peaks. In the late 1980s, Japan had been "the center of gravity" in the international art market. But its economy imploded, sending Sotheby's stock reeling. Ten years later, the Internet bubble drove another auction boom among Silicon Valley newbies, and the bubble burst again. Ten years later, we watched the same film play out. This year could be deja vu, all over again ... all over again.
The graph they use is a little silly - you could draw the same conclusions from a vast array of stocks that went up when the economy was booming and went down when it wasn't.
There may well be a bubble in China at the moment, judging by the government's increasingly desperate attempts to bring prices under control. But it doesn't take many people to make a bull market in the art world (witness the pre-Raphaelite boom in the 1990s), and I reckon there are enough new Chinese millionaires to keep prices rising for a while yet.
Cowdray collection to be sold
April 21 2011
Picture: Daily Mail
Another aristocratic art collection bites the dust - this time that of the Viscounts Cowdray. The house, Cowdray Park, has been on the market for a while (asking price £25m), and now the pictures are going too, at Christie's. The highlight will be a full-length Gainsborough of Miss Read (above the piano), with an estimate of £6m.
It's all part of a process of 'rationalisation', apparently. Lord Cowdray describes the house as a 'noose around his neck.' Nice noose.
Superlative-itis
April 20 2011
Picture: Sotheby's
How many hyperbolic superlatives can you fit into an opening paragraph? In their catalogue entry, Sotheby's goes for the record over Jeff Koons' $20-30m Pink Panther:
Representing the highest tier of Jeff Koons' artistic achievement, Pink Panther from 1988 is immediately identifiable as a masterpiece not only of the artist's historic canon, but also of the epoch of recent Contemporary Art. It conflates the classic themes that define Jeff Koons' output - materiality and artificiality, eroticism and naivety, popular culture and rarefied elitism – and is, quite simply, the model expression of one of the most innovative and influential artists of our times. The elite edition of three plus one artist's proof is immensely illustrious: one version is housed in the Museum of Modern Art, New York and another resides in the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Following the spectacular successes of major exhibitions at Versailles; Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and the Serpentine Gallery, London in the past two years alone, Jeff Koons' critical reputation today is virtually unmatched. As one of the salient works from a period of astounding development within his career, Pink Panther is a sculpture of enduring art historical significance, and its appearance at auction affords an exceedingly rare opportunity.
Someone should write a Google Translate programme for this sort of thing.
Compare the above with Sotheby's more restrained and readable opening paragraph for their catalogue entry for Titian's Sacra Conversazione, which holds the auction record for a work by Titian at $16.8m: [More below]
Hockney sale at Bonhams
April 20 2011
Picture: Bonhams
The top price today was £66,000 for An Image of Celia, above. One of the other anticipated works, George, Blanche, Celia, Albert and Percy, didn't sell (est. £15-20,000).
'The one that got away' - a newly discovered Rothko at Christie's
April 13 2011
Christie's will offer a previously unknown painting by Mark Rothko on May 11th, proving that you can even make discoveries with modern art. 'Untitled No.17', painted in 1961, was bought directly from the artist, and had never been heard of or seen since:
“It’s one of the very few that got away,” said David Anfam, London-based art historian and the author of “Mark Rothko: The Works on Canvas.” “It went to a private collection soon after it was made and those collectors just kept a very low profile.”
The estimate is $18-22m. More here. Earlier this year, another newly discovered work by Andy Warhol made $17.4m. Sod finding lost Old Masters - I need to make find me one of these lost modern things.
Extremely rare object offered by Christie's
April 13 2011
It's a job! Not many of these in the art world at the moment. If you're fluent in another language, and interested in Old Masters, there's a vacancy in Christie's OMP department in King St - one of the best places to work in the art market. Closes 15th April.
Mid-season sales
April 12 2011
There are some nice things in this week's mid-season sales at Sotheby's and Christie's, but nothing as exciting as the forthcoming £20m Stubbs at Christie's main sale in July.
Sotheby's sale offers more evidence that the aristocratic sell-off continues apace, with part of the collection of the family of the Marquess of Ailesbury/Earls of Cardigan. The ancestral portraits on offer are of varying quality, however, and it always makes me sad to see centuries of collecting dispersed all at once for not much gain. [More below]
The attribution from hell?
April 11 2011
Picture: Sotheby's
Sotheby's must have been presented with a real puzzle when it came to cataloguing the above portrait for this week's old master sale, and I'm impressed by their solution. [More below]
More deaccessioning
April 11 2011
The headlines today are that Bolton Council has decided not to sell a work by local artist Alfred Heaton Cooper (above). But they will press ahead with the sale of 36 other works deemed irrelevant to their 'core collection'. These will be offered at Bonhams over the next few months. The list includes:
- Gaspard Dughet Classical Landscape
- Richard Ansdell Buzzard and Ptarmigan
- William Powell Frith A Dream of the Future
- 18th Century French School The Finding of Oedipus
- Arthur Ambrose McEvoy Madame Errasuriz
- Walter Richard Sickert Pauline de Talleyrand-Perigord
- Philip Wilson Steer The Falls at Aysgarth
- John Everett Millais The Somnambulis
- George Romney King Lear
- Edward Burne-Jones Danae and the Brazen Tower
- Charles Ginner English Landscape
Yet more optimism
April 8 2011
From the BBC news website:
A cobweb-covered painting found behind an old bureau in a Northamptonshire farmhouse could sell for a six-figure sum, an auctioneer has said. The picture of a French village is believed to be by Maurice Utrillo, an early 20th Century post-impressionist painter. Last December an auction of his work in Paris raised over $7m (£4.3m). ...
"We are attributing the painting to him. We have put it in with a conservative estimate of £2,000 to £3,000 but it is caveat emptor, buyer beware," he [auctioneer J P Humbert] added.
I'd be very beware. To see some Utrillos vraiment, cliquez ici.
Stubbs to break £20m barrier?
April 6 2011
Auction news from Christie's this morning; George Stubbs' masterpiece Gimcrack on Newmarket Heath, with a Trainer, Stable-Lad and a Jockey (1765) will be offered for sale on 5th July, with a lower estimate of £20m. This follows Sotheby's sale of Stubbs' Brood Mare and Foals in December 2010 for just over £10m, which set a new auction record for the artist by some margin.
Both prices suggest that Whistlejacket, bought by the National Gallery in 1998 for £15.75m, was a bit of a bargain.
Only paintings by Turner, Pontormo, Rubens and Rembrandt have previously made more than £20m at auction.
Art History Futures
April 6 2011
A triptych by Zhang Xiaogang has sold for $9.8m in Hong Kong, setting a record price for a Chinese contemporary work of art.
If anyone thinks this is a high water mark for Chinese contemporary art, think again. It's probably just the beginning...
Murillo returns to Tyntesfield
March 27 2011
The National Trust has announced the return of a Mater Dolorosa by the studio of Murillo to Tyntesfield House in Somerset, where it once hung.
The Trust bought the picture for just over $80,000 at Christie's in New York, against an estimate of $30-50,000.
