The Frieze auctions start tomorrow with Sotheby’s, followed by Phillips de Pury on Saturday, Christie’s on Sunday and the Italian sales at Christie’s and Sotheby’s on Monday. So let’s recap what the London Contemporary art market has done. The Damien Hirst sale last month capped extraordinary growth over a four-year period. The extraordinary success of the Hirst sale, which will most likely eclipse the totals from the Frieze auctions. The size of the Hirst sale also skews the totals in that the day sale did substantially more business than the evening sale. Otherwise, a trend toward the most expensive lots would be more pronounced. (After the Frieze sales, we’ll have a look at the numbers for 2008 with and without Hirst.)

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Bloomberg Worries About Russians and Guarantees

Here’s an awkward situation, this week’s Contemporary Auctions in London were assembled–and financial guarantees made–long before the acute events of September and October dramatically changed the world’s financial outlook. Nowhere is the turnabout more pronounced than Russia where the natural resource magnates are feeling the pinch of margin calls, capital flight and frozen credit. Bloomberg has two stories today that put the picture together. Read the rest of this entry »

Christie’s London Sale of Art of the Islamic and Indian Worlds Proves

Someone Still Has Some Money.

It’s been a bad week for the financial markets and its still only Tuesday. But in London, a rare Fatimid carved rock crystal ewer that was discovered in a regional auction, sold for $5.58 million dollars during Chrisie’s Art of the Islamic and Indian Worlds auction. The entire sale grossed £10.4 million ($18 million). The top ten lots, including the ewer, accounted for $11 million of the sale.

Rare Islamic Artifact Goes for nearly $5.6 million (International Herald Tribune)

Charles Saatchi Finally Opens His Museum in London

Martin Gayford on Bloomberg and Waldemar Januszczak in the Times of London reviews the inaugural show of Chinese contemporary art at Charles Saatchi’s new Chelsea museum. The Daily Telegraph has a story and pictures of the building and the art.

Here’s the Times’s Januszczak on the building and show:

It is always difficult to tell from an opening visit what kind of service a new location will provide for the art inside it, but to my eyes, we have here 70,000 sq ft of well-nigh-perfect modern art space. Behind the portentous Duke of York HQ facade, four floors of interconnecting white cubes have been tastefully stacked, illuminated from above by what appears to be a sequence of soft and shrouded roof windows. It’s a beautiful illusion. All the lighting is artificial. But how lofty and airy the galleries appear. Some spaces are spectacular, others modest, as the higgledy-piggledy nature of the original building bequeaths a useful air of variety to the new arrangement. All this is a big architectural improvement on the depressing wooden sarcophagus in which the art struggled so hopelessly in the old Saatchi Gallery on the South Bank.

(The Best Stuff After the Jump) Read the rest of this entry »

PdP has a 23-ft. Tall Murakami Sculpture to Lead Their Frieze Sale

Takashi Murakami’s Tongari-kun (2003-2004), estimated at between £3.5-£4.5 million, is the star of Phillips de Pury’s Frieze sale that will take place on Saturday night, October 18th. The sale has strong works by Keith Haring, Donald Judd, Anselm Keifer and many others. Our particular favorite is the Joan Mitchell La Grande Vallée (1983). Mitchell’s works have hit a $5 million plateau and this is estimated right there at £2-£3 million.

Josh Baer reports that the Murakami is being sold without a guarantee, an increasingly common occurrence for the top lots. Why? Baer doesn’t give an answer but it may be because consignors are willing to take on more risk in exchange for a greater upside participation. Sotheby’s recent earnings have suggested that the house’s increasing restraint when using auction guarantees had cut into profits. For consignors that would mean selling without a guarantee represents a greater gain.

(We’ll have links to the catalogue once PdP gets it online.)

Godfrey Barker on the Hirst Sale Results

Newsweek has a brief item on the Hirst results:

But is Hirst’s work really recession proof—especially given the susceptibility of his pieces to decomposition? “This sale has proved that Hirst is a safe return,” says art-market expert Godfrey Barker. “The superrich need somewhere to put their money, and they’re pouring it into art. We are entering a world where art is trusted above real estate and General Motors.” Along those lines, Hirst plans to invest his new millions in modern masters like Francis Bacon—though it might not hurt to hang on to a few of his own commodity-encrusted creations, too.

The Frieze Art Fair Auctions Are Bigger Than Ever

Scott Reyburn has a preview of the Frieze auctions, at least, Christie’s Frieze auction which features a Fontana Fine di Dio, this one in black, estimated at £12 million. A Pepto-pink Fine di Dio failed to sell for £8 million in London in June. But a gold one went for a record £10.3 million in February.

Call this the year of the egg:

[Philippe] Segalot said that black was not necessarily an uncommercial color for a “Fine di Dio” canvas. “There are no rules when it comes to Fontana’s colors, at least as far as I’m concerned. Composition is equally important,” he said. “Black and white are the ultimate colors for the `Fine di Dio,”’ said Ordovas. “The canvas isn’t just black, it’s glittery which gives an incredible spatial quality to it.”

Over at Sotheby’s the emphasis is on Gerhard Richter. Two Richters, two Warhols, a Basquiat and Hirst medicine cabinet are the top lots at Sotheby’s. Jerusalem is a Richter landscape that’s estimated at £5 to £7 million. This red Abstraktes Bild–a hot run of these paintings has been taking place this year too. The Warhols are a set of skulls estimated at £5 to £7 million and Gold double Mona Lisa estimated at £1 to £1.5 million.

Beneath the Fontana in price at Christie’s is couple of Richters too. Claudius, estimated at £6 million.Reyburn has Rachofsky evaluating it as, `fabulous painting at a fair price.” Kerzenschein, the other Richter, is estimated in the £2 ot £3 million range. Christie’s has a Warhol Double Marilyn, at  £4.5 to £6.5 million, and Richard Prince’s  Dude Ranch Nurse #2, estimated at between £2.8 and £3.2 million. Aside from the Bacon and several Freuds, there’s a de Kooning and a Doig. The de Kooning, estimated at between £2.5 to £3.5 million, is from 1986 and follows the £3.5 million sale of a 1986 canvas at Phillips de Pury in June.

For an overview of the Contemporary art sales in London over the last few years, see This Is London.

“October will become just as important, if not even more important, than February and June in London,” said Pilar Ordovas, Christie’s head of contemporary art in London. “There are more international collectors in London during Frieze week than at any other time of year.” Ordovas called the selection “the most comprehensive and valuable” autumn sale to date.

“The sellers don’t have to be concerned, it’s the buyers who have to be,” Dallas collector Howard Rachofsky said in a telephone interview. “Collectors are looking at these auctions on a piece-by-piece basis. If there’s something rare and exceptional people will step up, but if it’s just another example they’ll pass.”

Rachofsky said that the market for works by less established artists in the 300,000-pound to 1 million-pound range “could get a little soft.”

If the market makes you crazy, there’s still more to be seen and done in London. Kate Taylor’s NY Sun piece focuses on the alternatives.

Fontana Work May Fetch $21.8 Million in Record Christie’s Sale (Bloomberg)

Warming Up for Frieze (NY Sun)

Christie’s Announces Portrait for London Sale

Francis Bacon’s Portrait of Henrietta Moraes (click on the image for a much larger view) will be offered at Christie’s October 19th sale in London with an estimate at between £5.5 and £7.5 million. The portrait comes with an inscription from the subject to the consignor, Garech Browne.

To put the Bacon boom in context, it’s worth reading Michael Kimmelman’s review of the Bacon Retrospective at the Tate in the New York Times:

So in various respects, by his late 70s, Bacon had come to seem something of a throwback; it was widely said his best work was behind him. But since then historians have mined the sources from which he cribbed images and opened up the crucial subject of gay sexuality in his work, which was long repressed, and this, along with his bad-boy reputation, which never goes out of fashion, has made him a source of steady fascination, never mind the lurid films and biographies and the admiration of art-world celebrities like Damien Hirst. Most important, with the breathing space of a little time, it’s become obvious how pure a painter he was, not just early on.

Time Magazine’s Richard Lacayo also weighs in on the Bacon retrospective:

Francis Bacon did for despair what Michelangelo did for faith. He made it majestic. [ . . . ] It brings almost five decades of Bacons together into a kind of collective cry, one that makes you realize how rare it is to see contemporary art that attempts, much less achieves, a genuine tragic dimension. Irony you can find in any gallery these days, also low comedy, puerile cool and enigma. But in a time that has its share of tragedy, where is the art that tries to strike an equivalent note?

To do that he took whatever he needed from art history. [ . . .] He also drew on sources from far outside art, things like an illustrated medical text about illnesses of the mouth. He worked from reproductions, and from photographs of all kinds pinned to walls and scattered on the floor of his studios in a muck of paper, rags, used brushes and broken furniture that he dived back into for ideas.

His great gift was for conflation, visual and psychological, for compressing multiple possibilities into a single sliding form.

Bacon Portrait Press Release

Old School Bad Boy’s Messy World (The New York Times)

Francis Bacon: Tragic Genius (Time)

Roberta Smith Has the Last Word on Hirst, the Auction and the Market

Offering a post-mortem of the Sotheby’s sale, Roberta Smith says:

But beyond the spectacle that is Mr. Hirst’s art, life and career, none of it means much. The auction’s success doesn’t even say a lot about the non-Hirst part of the art market, although everyone in it was glad the sale didn’t fail.

Read the rest of the story, it’s worth it.

After the Roar of the Crowd, an Auction Post-Mortem (New York Times)

What’s Going On with Art Tactic?

On September 2nd, Art Tactic issued a report on the Sotheby’s Hirst sale declaring the auction a crucial test of art market confidence. The report was clearly designed to garner attention for the firm. And it worked. With the press hungry for any item related to the audacious auction, Art Tactic’s report got widespread pick up. Art Tactic’s Anders Petterson should have been ecstatic. But lurking in much of Art Tactic’s analysis to reach the press of the last year and more has been an almost hopeful expectation that art prices were softening. One presumed Mr. Petterson was merely alive to the potential for a correction–the art market has been on a dramatic run for several years and most likely needs a correction to forward in an orderly way.

To further add to the drama, Petterson is very familiar with Hirst’s market performance. In 2004, he issued a report on the Pharmacy sale that predicted the artist was flooding his own market and would collapse prices. Again, logical analysis but Hirst–ever the iconclast–pulled off quite the opposite by exciting and accelerating his market. This time around, Petterson made a better call, anticipating a successful sale.

Now that the Beautiful Inside My Head Forever auction has performed in every way, does that mean the art market is on a bullish tear? Whether this is the result of the week’s turmoil in financial firms and markets or an investment in predicting gloom remains unclear, but in this Bloomberg story, Petterson all but recants his declaration that the Hirst sale would be a measure of art market confidence:

“The sale performed as expected, but a little more on the positive side,” said the report’s author, Anders Petterson. “Does this mean the contemporary-art market is saved? The sale was so specific that I’m not so sure now.”

For the record, our contention is that the Hirst sale is not a measure of anything beyond the market for works by Damien Hirst. The sale is too unique to be used as a guage in either direction.

Hirst Art Lures Russians; Crisis Saps US Demand, Dealers Say (Bloomberg)