London: Does London still have its mojo as a place to buy and sell blue-chip contemporary art? Uncertainty hangs like smog over the city after Britain’s decision to leave the European Union.
Yet three major contemporary art auctions this week brought a total of £229 million (Dh904 million), or about $280 million — a sharp increase over the £152.2 million raised by equivalent events in February 2016. The sales at Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Phillips suggested the world’s wealthiest collectors were eager enough to spend money in London. The weakening of the pound since the British referendum has made items being auctioned in the currency more attractive. Telephone bidding was dominant.
“I’m surprised, but at the same time not,” Thaddaeus Ropac, an international dealer with galleries in London, Paris, and Salzburg, Austria, said Tuesday night after a Christie’s sale at which 95 per cent of the works found buyers.
“There’s so much creation of wealth, and that wealth is getting more concentrated,” Ropac said. “The art market always gets a fraction of it. The buyers just need a sense of trust.”
As was the case at the Impression and modern art sales a week earlier, Sotheby’s, helped by more expansive guarantees, mounted the highest-grossing auction. On Wednesday night, it raised £118 million with fees, a 70 per cent increase over February 2016. Ninety-three per cent of the 61 lots were sold.
“The market is healthy,” said Philippe SEgalot, a private dealer in New York. “There are more buyers than sellers. That sends a good signal for New York,” he added, referring to the auction houses’ bellwether contemporary auctions in May.
Top end of Richter market
Gerhard Richter has been a lucrative staple of these London auctions. On Wednesday, Sotheby’s included his 1982 painting Eisberg, one of three large-scale Greenland seascapes that the German artist painted after the end of his first marriage, estimated at £8 million to £12 million. The other two seascapes are in museums.
The top end of the Richter market had its wobbles last year, but Eisberg, owned by the same European collector since 1983 and offered without a guarantee, attracted competition from four telephone bidders, selling for £17.7 million to a buyer represented by Shu Zheng, a Sotheby’s staff member based in London who works with collectors in Asia.
Sotheby’s used guarantees to coax other big-name works to its Wednesday night auction.
Jean-Michel Basquiat’s 1982 mixed-media Untitled (One Eyed Man or Xerox Face), which Sotheby’s was eager to associate with the New York artist’s coveted Boxer paintings, was the most highly valued work of the week, at £14 million to £18 million.
Guaranteed by Sotheby’s at a level that dealers such as SEgalot described as “aggressive,” it nonetheless managed to sell for a bid of £12 million, albeit at what looked like a seven-figure loss to the auction house.
Real market price
Christie’s has become more circumspect about using its own finances to secure auction prices. After its 59-lot contemporary sale on Tuesday raised £96.4 million — 65 per cent higher than February 2016 — Francis Outred, Christie’s European head of contemporary art, noted how much today’s sellers “want to see the real market price.”
The German insurance company Provinzial Rheinland Versicherung had enough confidence to offer Peter Doig’s 1994 snowscape Cobourg 3 + 1 More at Christie’s without a guarantee. Estimated at £8 million to £12 million, it drew competition from three telephone bidders before selling for a top price of £12.7 million.
The family trust of the Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev was the seller, without a guarantee, of a Mark Rothko abstract, No. 1 (1949). Rybolovlev bought the piece from the Swiss businessman Yves Bouvier in 2008 for $36 million, according to Bloomberg News. At Christie’s, it sold within the estimate to a telephone bidder for £10.7 million, a price that reflected the work’s provenance. Rybolovlev and Bouvier are embroiled in a long-running lawsuit in which the Swiss businessman is accused of fraudulently overcharging the Russian collector for 38 artworks, including the Rothko abstract.
“Auctions are always the barometer of the market,” said Alexander Platon, a senior director at Marlborough Fine Art, adding that these London sales corresponded with today’s tastes.
“The selection of artists is very limited,” Platon said. “It’s not a market where people experiment. Everyone’s after the same thing. It’s a strong, stable situation.”
New level
The few younger artists included were established names familiar from museum shows. At Christie’s, the market for the Nigerian-born Los Angeles artist Njideka Akunyili Crosby, whose limited output of new works is exclusively being bought by museums, reached a new level when her 2012 mixed-media standing figure study of a young girl, The Beautyful Ones was pushed by six telephone bidders to £2.5 million. The price was almost three times the previous auction high for the artist. It was only her third work to have appeared at auction.
The German-born photographer Wolfgang Tillmans is currently the subject of a one-man exhibition at Tate Modern in London. Christie’s and Sotheby’s both capitalised on this moment by kick-starting their sales with big aqueous Freischwimmer chromogenic colour abstracts by the artist. A blue example from 2011 went for £269,000 at Christie’s; a yellow version sold for £464,750 at Sotheby’s. The previous auction high for the artist had been about £190,000.
Demand was much more subdued, however, at Phillips’ thinly attended sale of 28 lots Wednesday afternoon. Uncertain of the mood in the London market, the Russian-owned auction house had been cautious about guaranteeing high-value works.
Solid and predictable
Just four works carried guarantees, including a 2008 Rudolf Stingel gold “carpet” painting, Untitled (Plan B), and a large 1990 Miquel Barcelo Muletero bullfight canvas. These led the auction, and each sold to their third-party guarantor for £2.9 million with fees.
“We were pretty cautious at this sale in terms of our guarantee positioning,” said Edward Dolman, Phillips’ chairman and chief executive. “We could have been a bit more aggressive. The market seems solid and predictable.”
The Phillips sale grossed £14.7 million — about £10 million down from February 2016 — with 18 per cent of the lots left unsold.
“The market is back for sure,” Outred, the European head of contemporary art at Christie’s, pronounced after his buoyant £96.4 million auction.
Not so fast. Twelve hours later, Christie’s announced that it would close its secondary London salesroom and pare back its Amsterdam operations, with the loss of as many as 250 jobs strong.As ever in today’s globalised market, wherever art happens to be sold, there are winners and losers.
