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Magritte is the New Picasso: London’s Winter Modern Auctions Sales Analysis

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Claude Monet, Le Palais Ducal, oil on canvas, 1908 (est. £20,000,000-30,000,000)

This detailed analysis of the February Modern 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.

Sitting in a airport VIP lounge during February's Evening sales of Impressionist, Modern and Surrealist art, a collector set down his iPad after watching the auctions and quipped, Magritte is the new Warhol.

It was a good line because it not only acknowledged the volume of work by the Surrealist master that had sold in the Winter season but it also nodded toward the restructuring of the Contemporary art market that has seen the mysterious disappearance of Andy Warhol from auction market leadership.

But it turns out that something even more fundamental may be taking place in the art market. It was only a year ago, in the same sales, that a mysterious buyer hoovered up works by Pablo Picasso through the clumsy and obvious bidding of Gurr Johns's Harry Smith.

That buying contributed to the £166m spent on Picasso's art that season which seemed, at the time, like a harbinger of another big year for the artist. Indeed, it was. The Picasso market reached another apex in 2018 with annual hammer price volume in Evening sales over $550m. The average price was also at a near peak just behind the previous record year of 2015 that saw lower sales but a higher average price.

Perhaps all of that market activity left buyers exhausted. Because this Winter in London, Picasso's market volume was less than 10% of the previous year's total. Evening sales totals were off by more than a quarter this season from last. Picasso dominated last year's sales with 42% of the market; Magritte took top spot this season with 13% of the spending volume.

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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 Contemporary Sales, 2007-2019

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This analysis of the 13-year analysis of February Contemporary  Art Evening sales 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. 

If you had the feeling the Winter Contemporary sales in London last week were a bit of a letdown, you weren't wrong. On a like-for-like basis, these sales have taken a big step back to 2016 levels when the overall market experienced a steep 16% decline from the previous year, according to Clare McAndrew's recent report for Art Basel and UBS.

Add to that the big lump of the final price of David Hockney's Henry Geldzahler and Christopher Scott which sold for £37m. But if we look at the composition of these sales in the chart below, we can see that the parallels to 2016 are quite strong.

Notice that the top end of the market of works over £10m is quite constrained.

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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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