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Mid-Season Sales Move Up in Value, Mimic Concentration at Top

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Kerry James Marshall, Untitled (Painter) ($1.8-2.5m) $7.325m

This detailed analysis of the February Mid-Season Contemporary art sales in New York was made possible with data from our friends at Live Auction Art. It is available to AMMpro subscribers. Subscriptions begin with a free month for the curious.

The Mid-Season Contemporary auctions held in New York to fall between the ADAA Art Show and the Armory Show showed a substantial jump this Winter over last year's results. The combined sales at Sotheby's, Phillips and Christie's was $63m (excluding nearly $4m from Sotheby's fundraising sale for Miss Porter's School in Connecticut) this year over $53m for the same sales last year.

Just two paintings at Sotheby's—Jack Whitten's Special Checking and Kerry James Marshall's Untitled (Painter)—account for the entire increase in one year to the next. But that isn't the entire story. In 2018, there were almost 900 works on offer at the three houses. During that sales cycle, 82% of the lots sold. This February, 80% of the lots sold but number offered was off by a quarter down to 666 from 895 in 2018.

Although the number of works offered and sold were down, the average price per work was $117,119 in 2019 versus $72,141 in 2018. Even if we remove the two top lots, the average price in 2019 remains a very high $98.9m.

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London Winter Impressionist & Modern Evening Sales, 2007-2019

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This analysis of the 13-year analysis of February Impressionist & Modern Art Evening sales was made possible with data from our friends at Pi-eX. [Please Note: These charts are ONLY for Impressionist and Modern Evening Sales and do not include Single-Owner sales like last week's Wallace collection at Christie's.] It is available to AMMpro subscribers. Subscriptions begin with a free month for the curious. 

Although the Impressionist and Modern Evening sales were lopsided toward Christie's, both houses closed the week happy with their results. That seems to be part of a larger strategy to reduce the size of these sales and continue to increase the sell-through rate across the board in the industry.

The number of lots sold in London (exempting the works in the Hidden Treasures sale) were the fewest in a decade. This continues a trajectory of smaller Imp-Mod sales (by lot) that began in the peak year of 2014 and has steadily fallen over six years.

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The Top of the Impressionist & Modern Market, 2007-18

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This analysis of the 12 years of Impressionist & Modern Art Evening sales at Christie's, Sotheby's and Phillips was made possible with data from our friends at Pi-eX. It is available to AMMpro subscribers. Subscriptions begin with a free month for the curious. (Please note: these numbers do not include single-owner and curated sales that have punctuated the market at various times. The point of these charts is to show year-over-year changes and so the single-owner and curated sales are thought to interfere with a consistent comparison.)

There is something going on at the top of the art market. As we've seen from our recent posts on the last dozen years in sales information, there is an overall trend over the last three years toward fewer transactions in the Evening sales. This trend is most pronounced and visible in the Impressionist and Modern art field.

In previous posts, we've talked about there being three phases to the recent art market: the pre-financial crisis boom, the post-crisis recovery and then the post-2016 correction. In this post-2016 period, especially in the Impressionist and Modern market, the number of works coming to market and transacting has fallen. This fall is significant but not necessarily the cataclysmic event that many feared would damage the Impressionist and Modern market. Indeed, fewer objects transacting is a sign of the market's health as the value of the works sold in the same period has risen to levels above the previous period of 2009-2015.

Obviously, fewer objects adding up to higher sales volume is a sign that the top of the market is getting more selective and more valuable. Sotheby's, Christie's and Phillips are contributing to this process by emphasizing the sale of fewer works and looking for the ones that can attract the most value. 

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The Top of the Contemporary Art Market, 2007-2018

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This analysis of the 12 years of Contemporary Art Evening sales at Christie's, Sotheby's and Phillips was made possible with data from our friends at Pi-eX. It is available to AMMpro subscribers. Subscriptions begin with a free month for the curious. (Please note: these numbers do not include single-owner and curated sales that have punctuated the market at various times. The point of these charts is to show year-over-year changes and so the single-owner and curated sales are thought to interfere with a consistent comparison.)

Continuing our look at the last 12 years of Evening sales, we've got data fro Pi-eX on the Contemporary Evening sales from 207-2018. The familiar three-phase pattern we described for the broader market is visible again here (because the Contemporary market composes a large portion of the overall art market and the Evening sales volume.)

Seeing the reduced number of lots sold over the last three years comes as no surprise. But it does confirm the significant shift in the Contemporary art market from the trophy market that dominated the years 2010-2015.

The consistent number of lots sold during the 2010-15 period and the 2016-18 period did not yield a consistent dollar volume. In the chart below, we can see the rising value of the Evening sale lots sold.

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Three Phases of the Auction Market, 2007-2018

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This analysis of the 12 years of Evening sales at Christie's, Sotheby's and Phillips was made possible with data from our friends at Pi-eX. It is available to AMMpro subscribers. Subscriptions begin with a free month for the curious. (Please note: these numbers do not include single-owner and curated sales that have punctuated the market at various times. The point of these charts is to show year-over-year changes and so the single-owner and curated sales are thought to interfere with a consistent comparison.)

This is the first of a series of posts on the auction market over the last 12 years. The chart above shows the number of lots sold in the Evening sales in New York and London. These numbers exclude special sales of either single-owner collections or curated sales. What we're trying to provide here is a year-over-year look at the auction market as it appears in Evening sales in New York and London.

What the data shows is three distinct phases. The first is the peak of the last boom and the fall out of the financial crisis. The second is the asset reflation period from 2010 to 2015 when the art market presented surprising growth in the face of a broader global climate of uncertainty. The third phase we see in these charts is the last three years where total volume of lots sold has been consistently lower than the second phase.

Remember, because we are only looking at Evening sales in Impressionist, Modern and Contemporary art in London and New York and excluding special sales, we're not measuring the entire art market. All this chart shows is that the number of lots sold in New York and London in the Evening sales remains fairly consistent over these periods. The latest phase may simply reflect the recognition that works of art at the top of the market are so valuable these days.  The number of lots sold may reflect the auction houses' allocation of resources. But because these are sold lots we also have some sense of the demand.

We can see a fair bit more when we shift toward looking at the value numbers.

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