Global Coverage ~ Unique Analysis
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This analysis of the September 2018 Mid-season Contemporary in New York is available to AMMpro subscribers. Recent reports will be available to all viewers initially before going behind the paywall. Monthly subscriptions begin with the first month free. Feel free to subscribe and cancel before you are billed.
The Mid-season Contemporary art sales in New York were smaller this year than either in the Spring or last Fall. Whether that is a harbinger of a slow down in the middle market which has heretofore been a powerful driver of sales activity or simply a reflection of the shift in the broader market toward these types of works, remains to be seen. The marquee sales in November and May have a gravitational pull for consignors. Both day and evening sales have become more accessible to artists and works that might have previously starred in these types of shoulder season sales.
Take, for example, the two top lots among the three houses. One was a Frank Stella geometric painting that sold for $2.66m, toward the low end of the $2-3m estimate. The other was a study for the Kerry James Marshall work that sold for a record $21.1m earlier in the year. In 2017, those top lots were quite different.
The top lot of the 2017 sales cycle was a Milton Avery work that made $3.66m above the $3m high estimate calling attention to Avery's work which would also perform exceptionally well during the Rockefeller estate sales. The second lot of that cycle was a Joan Mitchell work that sold for $3.3m over a $2m high estimate. We've all seen the momentum that continues to drive through the upper reaches of the Mitchell market still.
There are more clues about the meaning of these sales results deeper in the data. But let's first look at some of the top line figures and compare them to a year ago.
***We've had comments from readers about the drop in sales. It is important to remember that there are two ways to look at sales cycles. One is to include all similar works sold during the same period to record the market demand and selectivity. That's what we did with our original report which included single-owner sales at each of the houses. That's what accounts for the drop in sales from 2017 to 2018. Sotheby's had two single-owner sales in the period and Phillips had another where KAWS first demonstrated some of his market momentum that continues today.
The second way is to look at like-for-like sales comparisons. Here it is worth reviewing how the mid-season contemporary sales performed year-over-year with the single-owner sales excluded. Why? Because you can see an important growth trend in the middle market persisting. According to numbers shared with us by Sotheby's, the September sales looked like this:
2018 Premium Total: $57.3m 2017 Premium Total: $46.6m
2018 Average Price: $72.2k 2017 Average Price: $51.5k
Hammer Ratio: 1.03 . Hammer Ratio: 1.11
The rise in premium total was 23% year over year. But the average price rose a whopping 40%. The fall in the hammer ration (the hammer price divided by the low estimate) shows that bidding stayed closer to the estimate range. A slightly higher rate of works getting bought in, 24% versus 21% the year before suggests that estimates have finally caught up with the market. The shoulder season sales are no longer bargain bins where collectors, dealers and advisors go to find overlooked works of value.
These numbers are the culmination of a trend that can be seen across the four sales offered in the last two years that saw a progression from the Spring of 2017 where the the premium total was $44.6m and the hammer ratio, 1.19; to Fall 2017's $46.6m, 1.11; to Spring 2018 where the total was still higher at $53m with a 1.07 ratio; to Fall 2018's $57.3m, with a minimal 1.03 ratio. It's easy to see the way the estimates and hammer prices are converging as specialists get a better grip on the market. Curiously, the average prices bounce around the $50k range for three of the four sales cycles. But then the average price jumped this September.
We try to stay out of the horse race between the houses in these sales analyses. But to be fair to Sotheby's who flagged this data, we can look at some differences between the houses. Sotheby's consistently has the higher average prices in the $70k range in 2017 and the low $100k range this year. But Christie's saw the biggest jump in average prices from consistent $50k range to $76k this past season. Christie's also consistently has a hammer ratio below 1 showing their mid-season estimates are aggressive.
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Art Agency, Partners comments on the Richter market in their inaugural newsletter. Under the heading ‘Misreadings,’ AAP says:
One of the major stories in 2016 was the looming scepter of art market collapse both in general and for specific artists, which, ultimately, proved exaggerated while the reasons for reticence were misunderstood. Take the Gerhard Richter. In the first half of the year, two mature abstracts of large scale for which there had been substantial financial expectation were withdrawn from auction. Based on this fact, there was widespread talk of a pullback in the Richter market.
AAP goes on to object to the idea that there has been a pullback in Richter’s market calling such a view “premature talk of a nonexistent stall.”
It’s not entirely clear what AAP is trying to say here but AAP does link to our post on the announcement of the third Richter sold by Eric Clapton. So we’re going to assume the writer has conflated our discussion of the market for large Richter abstracts with talk of an art market collapse (which would be very hard to find on these pages.)
Further below, we’ll address AAP’s argument. But to understand the market for large Richter abstracts, let’s look a chart (above.) These are the paintings that have driven much—but far from all—of the interest in the artist over the past few years. More to the point, the abstracts, in general, and the large works of five feet or more, in particular, have accounted for a substantial portion of the artist’s auction volume.
Over the course of two distinct periods, you can see from the chart above, the market for large Richter abstracts grew in price, frequency and volume.Continue Reading
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It has been a big year for George Condo's market. Five of his top ten prices—including the works that are in the number one and two slots—were sold 2016. Eight of the top 15 prices came this year too. Half of those in the November sales in New York where the Ames collection provided five of the six works on offer at Sotheby's. And three of those achieved top 15 prices.
Judging simply from the nearly $2m record price for the artist set during a July charity auction for Leonardo DiCaprio's foundation or the $1.3m paid during a Sotheby's day sale in May, the demand for Condo's work has come as a bit of a surprise to auction specialists.
With 10 works on offer—two at Christie's, two Phillips and the Ames works plus another at Sotheby's—the November sales were a real market test for the artist. The number of Condo works on stands at Art Basel in Miami Beach a few weeks after the November sales only confirmed what was seen in the auction rooms.
Every one of the ten Condos on offer sold. Only two had to take the low estimate with an additional work landing within the estimate range. The rest were bid above the high estimates with several works subject to intensive bidding.
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Last year, the good folks at Artnet produced data on the Warhol market for us. They were kind enough to provide us with an update from their database. The results are striking. Total sales of Warhol paintings dropped by 74% between 2015 and 2016.
There's been a fair bit of attention paid to the fact that the auction market overall has been down 40-50% in the same period. Not only did Warhol stop acting as a motor of the art market; his sales have consistently driven the Contemporary market higher over the last decade and a half; but his market has become a significant absence.
(There's a more detailed look at these numbers for AMMpro subscribers, below, but for those who simply want to look at this graph, above, the information is pretty clear.) Warhol sales punctuate what may have been a major market pause.
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A brief look at the sales pattern, offers some clues to what's driving the new Bernard Buffet market:
“There is a recent and well-deserved resurgence of market interest in this artist,” said Jay Vincze, head of Impressionist and Modern Art at Christie’s London. “A very global audience is looking at high quality Western art today, and buyers respond to Buffet’s bold, graphic style and expressive colors.” […] “He is considered good value in the market with a lot of room to move.”
All of this is fine and good. The art market thrives on rediscoveries and changes of taste. But the recent boom in Buffet sales ought to be examined more closely.
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David Norman was for more than 30 years a senior specialist at Sotheby's in Impressionist and Modern art. Here he discusses the long transition in market preference from classic works of Impressionism by Monet to the late, series works like the grainstacks, an example of which (above) is on offer at Christie's next week. In the members area you'll get a detailed look at the trajectory of prices over more than a century.
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An entry dated October 30, 1891 in the ledger book of Knoedler Gallery (a branch of the French dealers Goupil & Cie) lists that the once fabled gallery, seller to the great American collectors of the Gilded Age and several succeeding generations, bought for resale hot off Claude Monet’s easel a work titled in english, (Haystack) Last Ray of the Sun, a heavily encrusted painting depicting a monumental grainstack in the French countryside.
The grainstack (commonly, yet erroneously, referred to in Monet’s oeuvre as a haystack), a symbol of agrarian france, is made massive by its position in the extreme foreground of the painting; the horizontal canvas cannot even contain its proper left edge. The hulking pyramidal form has been modelled by a molten array of lavender, pinks, and rust reds with glimpses of blue and green underlayers. It’s crest wears a thin halo of lapis blue and the whole is backlit by the faint and fading peach-and-yellow glow of the setting sun over a progressively darkening ridge of blue-green mountains. Its is a study in closely arranged colors, so subtly varied that the edges of the grainstack softly meld into the ground upon which it sits.
When many artists are typically searching for a new direction in their art, Monet in mid-career devised one of the greatest innovations in painting of his era. During the 1890s, he conceived multiple bodies of works built around a single subject: such as a field of Grainstacks viewed over several seasons, the facade of Rouen Cathedral viewed over successive times of day, and a row of Poplar Trees backed by changing skies, and some years later he created series of cityscapes of the bridges of London and grand views of Venice under the envelope of different weather conditions and times of day. Of course, the notion of creating bodies of works conceived as a series reached its final peak with the great cycle of the Waterlillies. These series transcended the Impressionist concept that our visual world is not fixed by, but rather the product of, transient perceptions with no visual permanence. In each case, Monet used a singular subject purely for its abstract, formal qualities and as a visual record of the passage of time and environment.
The French public first stood in front of this work and 14 other canvases from the series at Paul Durand-Ruel’s eponymous gallery in 1891. The single theme exhibition was a shrewd marketing tool; and Durand-Ruel was one of the first to curate single artist selling exhibitions. Today, we can stand in front of it at Christie’s pre-sale exhibition for the Impressionist & Modern Art sale to be held on November 16th. (More available to AMMpro members.)
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This artist's market report for the 2016 Frieze sales was prepared in part with data gathered and charts created by Athena Art Finance. This report is available to AMMpro subscribers. Subscriptions come with a one-month grace period. Feel free to register to read the report and, if you don't like it, cancel your subscription before you are charged.
The market for Lucio Fontana, the prolific Argentine artist who spent the most important part of his career in Italy, peaked last year during the October Italian sales when 26 works were offered and 21 sold for a combined total of £36.6m. With a large body of work—the slashes—that is both easily recognizable and was created in a seemingly endless variation of color and slashes, Fontana looked to be riding a wave of interest in Italian abstract artists to become a market-driving figure, a bellwether of the global Contemporary art market.
This year, Fontana had 27% fewer works on offer. More important to his market, there was dearth of major works like the black La Fine di Dio that accounted for 45% of 2015's total sale. Overall, the Italian sales in London were off by 50%. Where the 2015 sales made £83.6m, 2016 could only muster £42m in sales composed of works by lesser known artists.
Fontana was eclipsed by Alberto Burri in total sterling volume and saw Enrico Castellani post results that were 60% of his total. Comparing Fontana's results year-over-year, the £36.6m of 2015 had shrunk to £8.64m in 2016. The Italian sales were down by 50% but Fontana's market for the October sales cycle in London was off by more than 75%.
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Perhaps this is going too far against conventional wisdom. But reading this paragraph from James Tarmy’s mini-profile of Almine (Rech) Ruiz-Picasso as she opens her New York gallery outpost, one wonders whether it is fair to hold an dealer accountable for an artist who burns too hot on the market.
Here’s Tarmy:
Ruiz-Picasso has a history of backing younger artists with mixed results. She’s shown such artists as Joe Bradley and Taryn Simon, who have emerged as steady, respected forces in the art world, but she’s also been a proponent of artists such as David Ostrowski and Anselm Reyle, whose prices and prestige skyrocketed, then crashed. “Sometimes it doesn’t work,” she acknowledges. “Sometimes they’re only good for a short time, but that’s the risk.”
Allowing for the understandable need for gallerists to maintain the sense of a steady and stable market for their artists, the overall impression in the art market is that any sign of diminishment or retreat is a failure for an artist.
But markets don’t work that way. When prices get out of reach, some group of buyers are left behind. In many markets, those buyers will return once prices come back to their level.Continue Reading
It is somewhat cruel and unnecessary to dwell on the resale of a once hot artist. And it is always worth remembering that any completed sale has a buyer who wants the work. But it did not go unnoticed that Jacob Kassay's once desperately-sought silver work, in the smaller size of 48 inches, sold at Sotheby's late last week during the day sale for £25,000.
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