Christie's and Sotheby’s sold just under £248m ($399.3m) worth of Impressionist and Modern art in three days of auctions in London earlier this week. The total is one of the highest ever achieved for the February Impressionist sales in London, and seemed to prove that the recession that hit the art market in 2009 is well and truly over. ARTKABINETT social network for fine art collectors reported yesterday on some frenzied Russian buying. Today, we return to London.
Both auction houses have been reporting an increase in turnover as confidence has returned and business expanded.
Christie’s new chief executive, Stephen Murphy, also reports a sizeable rise in the number of new clients registering to bid in its sales in 2010; the year saw a 13% increase in new clients from continental Europe over 2009; a 24% increase in Britain; and a 32% rise in America. Despite this bullishness, the mood in the salerooms ranged from sluggish to euphoric during Impressionist week in London, indicating that sentiment in the art market is more complex than the figures might reveal.
Certainly, there is plenty of money being spent on art, but buyers are extremely picky. Trying to sell anything other than top-quality works that are new to the market and have an excellent provenance is still an uphill struggle.
The Gala-Salvador Dali Foundation paid a world record £4m (including commission and taxes) for “Etude pour ‘Le Miel est Plus Doux que le Sang’”, (upper right) one of Dali’s very first Surrealist paintings.
Giorgio Morandi’s 1953 “Natura Morta” sold for £1.2m, above the top estimate, to Xin Li, who looks after Christie’s important Asian clients and was bidding for an Asian buyer.
This was the first time in recent memory that a Morandi had been bought at auction by an Asian collector. The top lot proved to be Pierre Bonnard’s rich and colourful “Terrasse à Vernon” (pictured above), which sold for £6.4m (£7.2m including commission and taxes) to Sandra Nedvetskaia of Christie’s Zurich office, on behalf of a Russian collector.
A triptych of studies of Freud by his friend, Francis Bacon, proved the star of the show (pictured right).
Ten bidders helped push the price way past its £9m top estimate. At £17m, the bidding settled into a tussle between a Swiss-based Greek collector, Dimitri Mavromatis, on the telephone, and Alex Lachmann, a dealer from Cologne, who was in the room.
The two raised the stakes in £500,000 increments, but when Mr Mavromatis offered only another £100,000 over Mr Lachmann’s £20.5m, the auctioneer, Tobias Meyer, turned him down, insisting that the next bid should be £21m. Mr Mavromatis demurred and Mr Lachmann brought home the Bacon.
Refusing a slightly higher bid is rare, but Mr Meyer is a man of strong, passionate views. "Connoisseurship and the eye are the keys to our world," he said immediately after the sale.
"This was a great collection going to great collectors". Rare works of singular importance have a following, but opportunities don’t arise often and buyers must seize the chance when it presents itself. This was not a night for the indecisive bid.
A telephone buyer paid a record 4.6 million pounds -- four times estimate -- for the 1930 Julio Gonzales iron sculpture “Masque ‘Ombre et Lumiere.’’’
