This is pretty quick turnaround for an Old Master painting. Orazio Borgianni was a contemporary of Caravaggio. The current market interest in Caravaggisti, artists who were inspired by Caravaggio like Orazio Gentileschi, has generated some very strong sales. In December, a major self-portrait by Orazio Borgianni was sold for €290k at German auction house Leo Spik. Now, only two months later, the owner believes Sotheby’s Old Masters Paintings Evening Sale on January 29 will provide a better venue where the estimate is for $400,000 – 600,000. That’s still a far cry from the $5.3m paid in 2012. Here’s Sotheby’s description of the work:

The remarkable ascension of the painting is a recognition or Borgianni’s overlooked place in annals of art history and that he was a notable figure in a bustling artistic community in Rome. A contemporary of Caravaggio, Borgianni lived a similarly peripatetic, roguish life that included wounding a man in a sword fight and the accusation that he, along with artist Carlo Saraceni, plotted an assault on rival artist and writer Giovanni Baglione. In Baglione’s Lives of the Artists, Borgianni is even said to have attacked Caravaggio in Rome by throwing a bottle of varnish at him after Caravaggio allegedly laughed at the artist. While details about Borgianni’s life are scant, what is known about him portrays the artist as the modern archetype of a rebel artist, which centuries later would come to define the popular idea of an artist.

The self-portrait itself is astonishingly modern in its portrayal of the artist as a rakish, debonair young man. With a pensive and almost bored expression, Borgianni’s self-portrait captures the young artist at the height of his artistic power and confidence, seemingly unperturbed by the demands of his profession. The painting also includes the Latin inscription “QVO MAGIS RIMOR, MAGIS MIROR,” which translates to “the more I seek, the more I am amazed,” a proto-Enlightenment motto that further establishes the artist’s modern attitude.

In November, the market for art deco artist Tamara de Lempicka took a somewhat unexpected upward turn when Sotheby’s sold La Tunique Rose for $13.36m above a $6m low estimate. A favorite artist among celebrities, Jack Nicholson, Barbra Striesand and Madonna all own her work, the Polish painter’s work appears at auction with some regularity but in 2009 four works were sold, mostly from the collection of designer Wolfgang Joop, for a combined price of more than $13m.

It is not uncommon when an artist’s market rises to see a work that previously set a record price come back to the auction block. The thinking roughly goes that when the artist is in demand, the work that had been singled out by price competition is likely to be in stronger demand. With that in mind, Christie’s announced today that it would offer Tamara de Lempicka’s Portrait de Marjorie Ferry (1932) with an estimate of £8,000,000-12,000,000 ($10.4-$15.6 million) will star in Christie’s Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sales in London on February 5th, 2020.

The portrait of Marjorie Ferry had been top lot in the Joop sale making $4.89 million in 2009 and setting a record price for Lempicka.

The painting had been commissioned by the husband of singer Marjorie Ferry when Lempicka was at the peak of her fame as a portraitist. .“Tamara de Lempicka’s striking portraits came to symbolize the exuberance and freedom of the post-war society during the 1920s and early 30s, ” says Keith Gill, Head of Evening Sale, Impressionist & Modern Art Christie’s. Socially prominent and fiercely independent, Lempicka was at the peak of her powers and popularity in Paris in the early 1930s.

“Combining stylistic traits drawn from French Cubism, post-war Purism and Neo-Classicism her own study of early Italian masters, and realist trends in Germany,” as Christie’s describers the artist’s work, “Lempicka forged her own bold figurative style. She drew timely and fashionable inspiration from J.A.D. Ingres, whose mid-19th century classicism had also served as the springboard for Picasso’s return to the figure following the First World War. Lempicka quickly developed a pictorial manner that was acutely attuned to describing the liberated assertiveness and unrestrained pursuit of pleasure that characterized the 1920s, testing, stretching, but remaining within the new, more liberal boundaries of good taste.”

The family of a Parisian patron of Paul Signac who once owned 44 oil paintings by the Pointillist master is selling three works recently restituted, two from the Musée d’Orsay in Paris and one from the recently discovered Gurlitt hoard in Munich, at Sotheby’s in London this February. The works have a combined low estimate of more than $17m.

Here’s Sotheby’s release on the sale:

Sotheby’s Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale on 4 February will include three works recently restituted to the heirs of Gaston Lévy, one of the most notable patrons and art collectors living in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s. A highly successful businessman and property developer, Lévy and his family lived in a magnificent apartment on the Avenue de Friedland, which he filled with books, paintings and works of art, many of which he bought from the great dealers of his day, including Bernheim-Jeune, Paul Durand-Ruel and Ambroise Vollard.

Lévy’s art collection was dispersed under the Nazi occupation, and two of the works to be offered in February were lost to the ‘Einsatztab Reichsleiter Rosenberg’ (an organisation dedicated to receiving looted cultural property) in October 1940. After the war, the works were repatriated to the French state, and have recently been restituted by the French Government to Lévy’s heirs from the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.

The third of the works to be offered – Signac’s Quai de Clichy. Temps gris – had been stored in the Lévy’s country home, the Château des Bouffards, but later found its way into the collection of the dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt, whose illicit hoard was discovered by the authorities in 2012.

The jewel of the group is a Pointillist masterpiece by Camille Pissarro. Painted with enormous thought and dedication over a period of some six months, Gelée blanche, jeune paysanne faisant du feu depicts a young woman and child building a fire on a cold winter’s morning, where every brushstroke works to bring to life the movement of smoke in the wind.

Through his patronage of the Pointillists, Lévy also formed a lifelong friendship with Signac, holidaying with the artist as well as sponsoring his project to paint 107 ports in France – securing his first pick from every batch of watercolours. Over the arc of his collecting career, Lévy owned forty-four oils by the artist. The auction will offer two paintings from different points in Signac’s oeuvre – transporting the viewer from a brisk morning in a Parisian port to the exotic delights of Istanbul’s waterside.

Camille Pissarro, Gelée blanche, jeune paysanne faisant du feu, 1888, oil on canvas, 92.8 by 92.5cm. (est. £8,000,000 – 12,000,000)

One of Pissarro’s greatest achievements, this tour-de-force of light and colour also ranks among greatest examples of Pointillism ever created. The creation of this extraordinary work was – as Pissarro’s letters from the time attest – a labour of love. Some six months in the making, Gelée blanche, jeune paysanne faisant du feu stands apart from the main body of his work, wherein the artist’s deep understanding of the new, scientific colour theory was harnessed to extraordinary artistic effect. Pissarro completed the work in time for the 6th exhibition of the Cercle des XX in Brussels, where it was heralded as a tour de force in Neo-Impressionism.

Conceived on a grand scale, the painting captures the effects of both heat and cold in a brilliant rendering of the complexities of light and atmosphere. Against the backdrop of the low sun casting shadows on the meadows and the lingering night frost, smoke rises with a shimmering heat, resulting in a remarkable and uniquely nuanced representation of fire, smoke and cold air that is yet to be matched.

The subject of the burning fire – and the challenge of representing it – was something that clearly intrigued Pissarro throughout his career. He returned to this particular subject no fewer than six times – twice in oil, and four times on paper (an example of which can now be seen in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford).

In addition to the brilliance with which the effects of light, fire and wind are rendered, Gelée blanche, jeune paysanne faisant du feu is also testimony to Pissarro’s empathetic approach to the human condition. In many ways, his interest in painting the working classes is what distinguishes him from so many of his contemporaries. In making humans the subject of his works – figures with landscapes, rather than figures within landscapes – he stands out as the great humanist among the Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist painters, marking out his independence from them.

This painting has previously been exhibited at many institutions internationally including Paris’ Musée de l’Orangerie and Musée d’Orsay, Tokyo’s The Bunkamura Museum of Art and São Paulo’s Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, to name a few.

Paul Signac, La Corne d’Or. Matin, 1907, oil on canvas, 73 by 92cm. (est. £5,000,000 – 7,000,000)

Paul Signac’s two great passions in life were painting and sailing, and when the artist first travelled to Istanbul in the spring of 1907 – an adventurous endeavour to pastures new – he was immediately struck by the unique quality of light and colour that filled the ancient city.

The historic location inspired twelve paintings, all of which take as their subject the Golden Horn, a
busy waterway teeming with life near the port of Istanbul, that was one of the key entrances to th
Ottoman capital at the time. In this ethereal work, the skyline of the city is easily recognisable in the
background, with the famous minarets of the Hagia Sophia an unmistakable silhouette on the horizon. In November 2019 another view of Constantinople was sold at Sotheby’s in New York for $16,210,000.

The brilliant luminosity of the composition, bathed in the morning light, is typical of Signac’s late style
– showing the influence of Fauvism – and is wonderfully effective here in paying homage to the
historical legacy and richness of the city, whilst rendering it in a completely fresh and modern way.

Quai de Clichy. Temps Gris, 1887, oil on canvas, 46 by 65.5cm. (est. £600,000 – 800,000)

This elegant, pointillist observation of the Quai de Clichy is a classic example of Signac’s Opus pictures,
paintings he considered ‘complete compositions’ which are now seen as his earliest and greatest contributions to Neo-Impressionism.

Signac’s family moved to the northwest of Paris in 1880, to a suburb running along the river Seine. Thevaried landscape of the region – comprising both the river and factory chimneys – provided a greatsource of inspiration to the young artist, fulfilling his interests in sailing, science and innovation. In theyear this was painted, Signac was joined in his painting expeditions around Clichy by Vincent van Gogh,who depicts the bridges just further up from this composition.

The work was discovered in the possession of Cornelius Gurlitt, a reclusive art hoarder who died in 2014, and having been identified as looted by the Nazis, was restituted by the estate to the heirs of Gaston Lévy in July 2019. The sister composition of Quai de Clichy. Soleil is now in the Baltimore Museum of Art.

Sotheby’s is announcing one of the most famous images from David Hockney’s career will be offered with an estimate of £20-30m during Contemporary Art Evening Sale in London on February 11th. The Splash (1966) is a companion work to the Tate Modern museum’s famous A Bigger Splash (1967) which is one of the best known works by Hockney and a key image from the 1960s.

The Splash previously set a record for Hockney’s work when it sold for £2.9m at Sotheby’s in London in 2006. Since that time, several works by Hockney have sold for many times that price resetting the artist’s market several times over. The first works to break into eight-figures were later paintings from after Hockney’s return to his Yorkshire home. Then, at the end of 2018, Hockney’s market was reset again with collector Joe Lewis’s dramatic sale of Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) for $90.3m in New York.

That sale was followed a year ago in London by the double portrait of Henry Geldzahler and Christopher Scott which made £37.6m in London last March. Although these were the top prices for Hockney’s work, pool pictures have continued to post very strong sales. The artist’s work on paper Piscine De Medianoche (Paper Pool 30), sold for $11.3 million at Sotheby’s in May of 2018. Recently, Hockney’s first pool painting, Picture of a Hollywood Swimming Pool from 1964 sold at Sotheby’s NY in November 2019 for $7.2 million.

The Splash is one of a series of three ‘splash’ paintings. The largest is the Tate Modern’s A Bigger Splash, which is similar in composition and scale. The Splash is 72 by 72 inches. A third painting, A Little Splash (1966), remains in a private collection and has never been sold publicly.

 

As the last days of the decade click off the calendar, it’s instructive to look back at this extraordinary period of growth in the art market. Prices at the very top—culminating in the much-fixated-upon sale of a Leonardo for $450.3 million—have risen far beyond what anyone could have imagined 10 years before, when the art market seemed on the verge of an extended fallow period. Yet the story of the last 10 years has been less about the unbelievable sums that have grown more like dares than measures of value and more about the broadening base of what is considered valuable, even investable, art.

This story has a plot. There is a beginning in the aftermath of the global financial crisis when art sales recovered faster than most experienced and sophisticated participants would have imagined; a climax, when successive record sales at the top of the market created what Tobias Meyer called the “masterpiece market” of competition for works that seemed to be beyond measurable value; and a denouement of sorts, when the value confirmed at the top of the market began to move more broadly among a greater number of artists to create this now-vibrant seven-figure “middle market.”

A Rapid Rise from a Smoking Ruin

Calling the art market a smoking ruin in late 2008 and early 2009 would have been only a slight bit of hyperbole. During the winter of 2009, one of the panic points in the global financial crisis, most art market participants expected the decade of the 2010s to resemble the market of the 1990s. When the Japanese-driven art market of the late 1980s collapsed, a deep recession cascaded throughout the 1990s art market.

After a cycle of disastrous guarantee-driven sales in the fall of 2008, one of the heads of contemporary art at a major auction house openly fretted to the press in front of younger staff that the market could be expected to hibernate for a decade or more after the previous four years’ frenzy of activity.

Those fears turned out to be the furthest from what happened. Starting with the record-setting €374 million Yves Saint Laurent-Pierre Bergé sale that Christie’s Paris held in February 2009, and proceeding through the early 2010 purchase of Alberto Giacometti’s Walking Man I for $104.3 million by Lily Safra and the $106.5 million purchase of the Brody Picasso, Nude, Green Leaves with Bust by Len Blavatnik, the art market demonstrated a kind of resilience that seemed to mock the very real panic and fear pervading the fragile and slowly healing global economy.

The most visible sign that art market would not be pulling in its horns was the $117 million Carte Blanche sale organized at Phillips de Pury & Co. in November 2010 by private dealer (and former head of contemporary art at Christie’s) Philippe Ségalot. Word was out that the market was back. By 2011, buyers who got caught up in the tail-end of the last market cycle started looking for a respectable exit. That fall more than 10 percent of the evening sale lots on offer had been bought in 2007 or early 2008. More than half appeared with estimates above their pre-crash selling prices. At Sotheby’s in 2011, the buyer of a Gerhard Richter abstract painting who paid $3 million in November 2007 was able to see 50 percent more paid for the same painting in 2011. That Richter was one of eight abstract works sold at Sotheby’s that night. The market was astonished at the prices, all well above estimates, and the fact that there were more than enough buyers to snap up all eight works at such strong prices, one for $20 million and another for $18 million, was a revelation. Richter’s abstract paintings, especially the large ones, would go on to become a major driving force in market volume.

Buying in Public and the “Masterpiece Market”

By 2013, the rapid upward rise of prices and the prevalence of works selling above the $40 million mark would propel many market transactions into the public realm of auctions. Many buyers preferred to pay more if they could “see” another buyer pursuing the same work. Because of this, in the period starting in 2013, the auction houses achieved a level of transactional dominance rarely seen before.

The preference for public sales gave birth to curated auctions combining works from different collecting categories around themes that would highlight buyer interest but also allow for public price discovery. From May 2014 to May 2016, Christie’s held a series of special sales aimed at the masterpiece market. The biggest one totaled $705 million in May of 2015. Two years later, Christie’s would shock the world and itself with the $450. 3 million sale of Leonardo’s Salvator Mundi in its November evening sale of contemporary art. This was effectively the end of the masterpiece market though plenty of very expensive works have sold since.

Part of the illusion created by the masterpiece prices was the idea that art had become an asset class. What followed from that idea was a number of services meant to cater to managing the needs of asset holders. Financial institutions developed art strategies, boutique finance firms emerged and art advisers and dealers became more sophisticated in their ability to speak the language of finance. A few finance professionals migrated to work in the art world, especially at Sotheby’s, which reoriented itself around a strategy of making the most of art as an asset.

A few nine-figure sales do not an asset class make. The incredibly high prices paid for incredible works of art by a few of the most recognized artists—Giacometti, Modigliani, Picasso, Matisse, Munch, Bacon, Rothko, Richter, Warhol—in the period from 2010 to 2015 created a highly valuable but also very thin market. The number of collectors rich enough and passionate enough to spend $50 million or more for a work of art has always been—and remains—vanishingly small. When he was Christie’s point man for its biggest lots, Brett Gorvy said he kept a list of all the clients who might spend $50 million or more on a work of art. The list was said to only have 141 names.

Beyond the Peak

There are, of course, far more than 141 art collectors in the world. Knight Frank estimates the population of Ultra High Net Worth Individuals, households with liquid investments worth $30 million or more, at 198,342 in 2019. There’s no good evidence explaining how or why new collectors have come into the art market since the 2015 peak. Anecdotal evidence, including the growing diversity of art and artists that regularly achieves high prices, suggests the market over the past three years has experienced a real shift.

Competition now lies in lower price bands with a greater number of lots appearing at auction in the $1 million to $5 million estimate level. This reflects the growing interest in and competition for works by artists who were previously overlooked or part of a group whose value was historically underestimated.

For much of the last four years, reporting on the art market has focused on the putative weakness reflected in the headline numbers. In this view, the market’s overall volume at auction has fallen, which must mean the market itself is down. There is another potential explanation. Instead of viewing the market as down because of the lower auction volume, we might take into account the fact that prices have stabilized in the years since the 2015 market peak. That suggests sellers and buyers are more comfortable with private transactions that don’t require the public confirmation of another bidder. If the market was truly down, we would see prices dropping across the board. Instead, we see weakness in the works of some artists but not a wholesale weakness in the market. Quite the contrary.

This alternate view of the market also takes into account a buyer’s ability to triangulate from objectively high masterpiece prices to relatively high prices for masters of a different type.

The essence of an asset class is not the ability to make a profit from owning the asset (though that is obviously a powerful motivation.) The option to sell even when times are bad and maybe for prices that are not as strong as what was previously paid—in other words, to get some of your money out—that also makes an asset attractive to a buyer. To preserve that option, there has to be another buyer who will come along behind you. With the emergence these last four years of a broader, more valuable market with a wider range of buyers looking for a wider range of artists, we may have finally reached the stage where art is behaving like an asset.