The May art auctions will feature fewer works, bigger price tags
AFTER November’s unprecedented New York auctions, which included the standalone Paul Allen estate sale (US$1.5 billion spent on art in about three hours), almost everyone agreed the market needed a break. “It was the biggest season ever,” says Alex Rotter, chairman of Christie’s 20th and 21st century art department. “After spending US$3 billion in two weeks, it’s legitimate to be a little exhausted from it.”
As a result, the coming May evening sales-widely considered the companion to the November sales in scope, price and quality-will be a comparatively subdued affair, auction house specialists predict. “The overall volume of auctions together, across all the houses, will be smaller,” says Brooke Lampley, Sotheby’s chairman and worldwide head of sales for global fine art.
“We were seeing a lot of delayed decisions from the pandemic coming to fruition,” Lampley says, explaining the deluge of big-ticket items last fall. “People who’d been hesitating to sell were finally confident to sell, so that brought a lot of material onto the market.” The May auctions, she continues, “will revert to the normative level of strength”.
That, of course, assumes the current economic instability won’t get in the way.
People in the auction world like to point to the art market’s resilience, noting that it managed to bounce back from Covid-19 virtually unscathed. But the coronavirus was, by and large, great for the world’s rich. In roughly the first year of the pandemic, billionaires accumulated an estimated US$4 trillion of wealth, according to an analysis from the Institute for Policy Studies.
Today’s economic volatility is different: Rich people are also taking a hit. The top 500 billionaires on the planet lost a combined US$1.4 trillion in 2022. Rising interest rates have constrained buying power, and anyone with a half-decent financial adviser is preparing for a possible recession by keeping cash on hand. Spending millions of dollars on a painting runs counter to that strategy.
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None of this is lost on Rotter. “I grew up in an America where money was basically free, and the more you had, the freer it got,” he says. “Now is the first time in I think 20 years that people have to pay to get money. That’s a new situation.”
But, he continues, recession fears are currently a problem for the US and Europe. “Asia and the Middle East have it very different right now,” he says, “and that’s why this global art market is a great thing in times like this. When things get tricky in certain regions, others don’t see those problems”.
The solution, both Rotter and Lampley say, is to bring items to auction that are top-tier and fresh enough that they lure buyers who’d otherwise stay on the sidelines. To do so, houses are relying on large tranches of art from estates rather than one-off consignments.
“I’m pretty sure, from a lot count, about 80 per cent of lots in the evening sale come from collections or estates,” Rotter says, name-checking the trove owned by late commodities trader Alan Press and his wife, Dorothy. It will represent nine separate lots in Christie’s 20th century evening sale, including an Ed Ruscha painting from 1966-69, Burning Gas Station, which carries an estimate of US$20 million to US$30 million.
There’s also an array from late philanthropists Jacques and Emy Cohenca, whose estate has 12 works across multiple auctions, including a bronze Louise Bourgeois sculpture executed in 1960 that will sell in the 20th century evening sale.
Sotheby’s will auction works from the collection of the late music executive Mo Ostin. His assortment of 30 pieces is valued at more than US$120 million and includes Rene Magritte’s famous L’Empire des lumières painting from 1951, which has an estimate of US$35 million to US$55 million.
There are a few big-ticket standalone items, too. Christie’s will sell a large 1983 Jean-Michel Basquiat with an estimate in the region of US$45 million, as well as an extremely rare 1910 painting by Henri Rousseau estimated at US$20 million to US$30 million.
Works by the artist come up so seldom that Rousseau’s previous auction record of US$4.4 million was set in 1993. Sotheby’s, meanwhile, is selling a gorgeous 1901-02 Gustav Klimt landscape estimated in the range of US$45 million. It also has a huge 1974 Color Chart painting by Gerhard Richter, coming to auction for the first time in 20 years; its estimate is US$18 million to US$25 million.
“We’re selling globally desired wish-list items,” Lampley says. “We have a whole steady evolution of the market.” BLOOMBERG
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