The Art Market: The gap between the best and the rest

Christie’s evening sale of postwar and contemporary art came in too late for last week’s column, but it cheered up buyers after the patchy opening to the week. The tally was £49.8m (£58.1m with fees), just short of expectations of £50.1m-£74.9m. A morale-boosting 89 per cent of the lots found buyers, and big prices were set for blue-chip British names: David Hockney, Lucian Freud, Peter Doig and Francis Bacon.

In contrast with last year, when sales were heavily bolstered by guarantees, the 62-lot catalogue had just 12 of these financial instruments. They totalled £14.8m on low estimate and made a useful £15.6m hammer. The top price went to Doig’s “The Architect’s Home in the Ravine” (1991), at £10m (£11.3m with fees) — on its low estimate. A surprise success was Hockney’s “Beach Umbrella” (1971), which doubled its estimate at £2.7m (£3.1m with fees). However, a messy Yves Klein, “Anthropométrie sans titre (ANT118)” (c1960), with a whopping £8m-£14m estimate, flopped: no one wanted it and it was bought in at £7.5m.

At the end of the sales fortnight, Nicholas Maclean of the London and New York dealership Eykyn Maclean commented: “I feel the sales were more positive than many people made out. While the volumes were indeed down, the desirable material sold well. It would be wrong to appraise the market solely on auction results, as a huge amount is being sold privately and through art fairs. Our experience is that there is still real hunger for good-quality works across the 20th century, and buyers are increasing well-educated and discerning.”

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Certainly, the private market seems more than healthy for top works: the insider newsletter Baer Faxt has just reported a transaction in the $500m range for two Abstract Expressionist paintings by Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. According to Christie’s Brett Gorvy in an Instagram post, the de Kooning is “Interchange” (1955). It was, says Gorvy, “until recently the cornerstone of the collection of producer David Geffen. During the past few months, however, it has been hanging in the Art Institute of Chicago.” He implies that the buyer is Ken Griffin, whose Citadel hedge fund has its headquarters in Chicago.

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Bonhams has made a number of brave or even foolhardy attempts to enter the contemporary art arena in the past, but last week it produced its best-ever result for such a sale. The total was a modest £5.3m (£6.4m with fees), but it beat the low end of expectations, with almost 80 per cent of the lots finding buyers.

Going over estimate was a bottle-top “tapestry”, “Peju’s Robe” (2006), by El Anatsui, which made £670,000 (£806,500 with fees), and Frank Auerbach’s “E.O.W. on her Blue Eiderdown V” (1963) was bought by London dealer Offer Waterman for £1.75m (£2m with fees).

It was just as well for Bonhams that it had catalogued separately Warhol’s large “Fourteen Small Electric Chairs” (1980). Despite being showboated in Hong Kong before the auction, the silkscreen, estimated at £4m-£6m, crashed out at £2.6m with no visible bidders.

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As the sales fortnight ended, the big surprise was the announcement that Sotheby’s long-serving co-chairman of Impressionist and Modern art, Melanie Clore, is stepping down. “This is a huge loss to Sotheby’s,” said one art dealer. “The art trade is a relationship business and she is highly respected.”

Clore has been with Sotheby’s for 34 years, has led the Impressionist and Modern art department in London since 1990 and was the first woman to conduct an evening auction for the firm. She took the decision in November before the firm’s acquisition of Art Agency, Partners in an $85m deal, I am assured. Clore says she has “a burning desire to create my own business”, so watch this space for her next move.

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The last of London’s great art-and-antiques emporia, Malletts, continues to struggle. Having moved from splendid premises in Bond Street to the smaller but august Ely House in nearby Dover Street in 2012, it is on the move again. It is looking for more modest digs in London and New York, where it is giving up its Madison Avenue premises. The firm, which was taken private in 2014, is part of Stanley Gibbons, an amorphous grouping of various art businesses. The auction component includes Dreweatts-Bloomsbury, Baldwins and Malletts, which has a 20 per cent stake in the Masterpiece fair. George Bailey, chairman of this group, says the decision to move was taken because “we don’t need to be in such a large space”. Sales will be now held at Dreweatts’ saleroom in Donnington Priory. According to Bailey, sales of antique furniture have been good so far this year — “but at half the prices similar pieces would have fetched 10 years ago”.

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It’s no surprise, really. The fair organiser Reed Expositions has pulled the plug on Paris Photo Los Angeles, just two months before the event was due to start in the engaging surroundings of Paramount Studios. “The level of sales during Paris Photo Los Angeles is not sufficient to support such a fair and to offer our exhibitors the best conditions of return on their investment,” said Jean-Daniel Compain, head of Reed’s culture division. At the same time, Reed has killed off plans to create Fiac LA, an offshoot of the Paris fair. Compain said the “difficult decision” was made due to “the absence of a mature market in terms of art fairs of this scale and scope”.

Not everyone will agree with him: Los Angeles is attracting more and more international galleries, with Hauser Wirth & Schimmel due to open a mega-space next month. It seems inevitable that a major international art fair must soon set up there as well.

Resource: http://www.ft.com