Art Market Monitor

A Quick Refresher Course on Imp & Modern Evening Sales Totals

Below is a chart that shows the sales totals for the New York Impressionist and Modern evening sales at both auction houses for the last 8 and 1/2 years. You can see that $200 million is the magic number. That combined sales total was hit four times in the last 17 sales. If one removes the clearly exceptional credit fueled boom years of mid-2006 to mid-2008, you can see that $200 million was exceeded four times and the market failed to reach $200 million four times.  So a number somewhere close to $200 million represents a median point for the markets. If these sales can reach that level, and that’s not a lay-up for them, it will be a clear sign of market stability.

In the chart below you can see that sales totals achieved last season were just above the level set in the Spring of 2003 when the market was still recovering from the collapse of the tech bubble and the aftershocks of the 9/11 attacks.[private_subscriber][private_bundle]

Since the chart is so small, we’ve prepared another version that compares the totals from Spring 2009 in New York with the numbers in the early years of the decade:

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