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Paris Contemporary Auction Analysis: Asian Artists, de Staël Dominate

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This Paris Spring 2018 Contemporary sales analysis is available to AMMpro subscribers. Subscribers get the first month free on monthly subscriptions. Feel free to cancel at any time before the month is up. Sign up for AMMpro here.

The Paris Contemporary art sales were punctuated by some dramatic sales that drove the overall performance far above expectations. You can see from market share chart (above) provided by our friends at Live Auction Art that both Sotheby's and Christie's were able to exceed their pre-sale estimates by a significant margin. In both cases, the totals were helped by the performance of a single lot.

For Christie's, that was Nicolas de Staël's Flowers which made €8.25m or more than twice the low estimate.  At Sotheby's, the big lot was Kazuo Shiraga's large and historically significant Takao which made more than four times the low estimate to reach €8.7m.

This analysis of the Spring 2018Paris Contemporary art sales results—including a look at market share by artist and a list of the most dynamic lots—is available to AMMpro subscribers. Subscribers get the first month free on monthly subscriptions. Feel free to cancel at any time before the month is up. Sign up for AMMpro here.

We will have a look at the historical sales numbers in Paris in another post. Here, let's look at the composition of the Paris Post-War sales. Artcurial had a number of modern works in their sale which we have set aside so we can look at the Paris Post-War and Contemporary market.

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De Staël Explodes in Paris Continuing Market Rise

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Nicolas de Stael, Flowers (3.5-5.5m EUR) €8.25m

Christie’s Evening sale of Contemporary art in Paris yesterday totaled €25.4m with a third of that value coming from Nicolas de Staël‘s Flowers which made €8.25m against an estimate of €3.5-5.5m. Other outperforming lots were Pierre Soulages‘s Peinture 227 x 306 cm, 2 mars 2009 which was estimated at €1-1.5m but made €2.4m; Kazuo Shiraga‘s Chikakusei Dokukakuryu, €1.87m; a small Joan Mitchell work that made €655k; and a Jean Dubuffet, Partition which hit €895k.

The day sale added another €9.33m to the total.

Sotheby’s Paris Sale Led By Zao Wou-ki & Shiraga

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It’s a been a couple of years since we’ve had a big Kazuo Shiraga price in the West. The most recent sales above $3m for the Gutai artist have been achieved in Hong Kong this year and three years ago. But the top three prices for the artist have come in Germany, New York and Paris. The last hosted the outright record at $5.3m four years ago at Sotheby’s. On June 6th in the Paris Art Contemporain Evening sale, Sotheby’s is offering Takao from 1959 with an estimate of €1.8 – 2.5m.

Also in the sale are several works by Zao Wou-ki, Jean Dubuffet, Hans Hartung and Nicolas de Staël. Here’s Sotheby’s take on their offerings:Continue Reading

A Quick Look at New York’s Contemporary Evening Sales

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Live Auction Art published the market share figures for Contemporary art pictured above. You can see that Sotheby's pulled off a strong set of sales to finish dead even with Christie's in Contemporary art (though a few stray Rockefeller lots would have given Christie's a negligible few points of market share. Phillips continues to gain its position in the market even if their market share remains far behind the big two.

The top of the Contemporary art market is still down. According to historical numbers gathered by our friends at Pi-eX, the Evening sale totals for Contemporary art for the Spring sales in New York were back below the level of 2013. Over the last six sales cycles, the totals shot above historical levels in 2014 and 2015 before pulling back to their lowest total in 2016 since the 2011 sales cycle. There was a brief rally in 2017 back to that 2013 level. Last week, we saw the numbers pull back slightly.

We'll have a more detailed analysis of the composition of those sales—which on first reaction are quite positive for their depth of value and breadth of new names—when we publish our Contemporary market report next week. In the meantime, let's look at what Pi-eX's numbers can tell us.

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Christie’s Milan Contemporary = $18.1m

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Christie’s had a robust sale of Contemporary art in Milan, according to their release:

The 6th consecutive Milan Modern and Contemporary art auction has achieved a strong total result of €14,693,500 /£12,809,793 / $18,162,635, selling 91% by lot.

 

Top 3 lots:
Lot 11 – Piero Manzoni, Achrome, 1958 selling for EUR 2,970,000
It is one of the earliest works of the artist’s series bearing the same name. Never offered before on the art market, in the same collection since 1976 and exhibited in the 2014 retrospective of the artist in Milan, as well as documented in all catalogue raisonnés on the artist, the work attracted international bidding.

Lot 17 – Lucio Fontana, Concetto spaziale, Atesa, 1967 selling for EUR 1,687,500
Showing a single clean slash through the red canvas, it was made in 1967, exactly 10 years after the artist introduced the series of tagli. These works were created during a period of exploration in space with the slash sometimes seen as a reference to the unknown, to the spatial dimension.

Lot 6 – Salvatore Scarpitta, Ammiraglio, 1958, selling for EUR 1,015,500
A pivotal piece of Scarpitta’s ‘wrapped’ or ‘bandaged’ series, where he deconstructed the anatomy of a painting, reconstituting its physical components to create a new and direct means of expression.

Six new auction records for Osvaldo Licini (lot 8), Leoncillo (lot 18), Antonio Donghi (lot 29), Piero Dorazio (lot 32), Fausto Pirandello (lot 43), and Claudio Parmiggiani (lot 56) were set.

 

London Mid-Season Contemporary Sales = £5m

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With only a handful of estimates above the five-figure range, the mid-season Contemporary art sales in London at Phillips and Sotheby’s brought in a combined total of £4.997m yesterday. Phillips had the larger of the two sales with £2.794m brought in by 195 lots out of the 235 offered for a an 91% sell-through rate. The top lot was an Antony Gormley sold within estimates at £369k followed by works by Kaws and Yinka Shonibare that also sold within the estimate ranges for £162,500 and £100k respectively. Below that level, a number of works popped over the estimates by Gormley, A.R. Penck, Jonas Wood and Yan Pei-Ming.

At Sotheby’s, we saw something slightly different with £2.2m achieved when 79% of the 163 lots offered were sold. There the bulk of the top lots were sold at prices above the modest five-figure estimate ranges. A Peter Halley work out-performed estimates to become the top lot at £150k; a Banksy work sold for three times the high estimate to make £137.5k; and fitting with this year’s fever for works by George Condo, a mostly estimated early work, Funny Landscape, from 1985 was sold for £112,500. (There’s a bit of a story there which we’ll get into later this week.)

Bonhams London PWC = £5.285m

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Frank Auerbach, Reclining Model, Back View (£120-180k) £872k

Helped along by a clutch of School of London works, Bonhams racked up a strong £5.285m Post-War and Contemporary art sale in London this week. Auerbach led the way with a sale that was more than four times the high estimate. Leon Kossoff also demolished expectations. The sale was helped along by Anish Kapoor, Banksy, Sigmar Polke, and Serge Poliakoff.Continue Reading

Jackson Pollock Drip Painting at Christie’s in March

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Jackson Pollock, Number 21, 1950 (£10-15m)

Over the weekend, Francis Outred announced over Instagram that Christie’s would be selling a small Jackson Pollock drip painting in its London sale of Contemporary art. The work carries an estimate in line with the sale in New York two and a half years ago of Number 12, 1950 for $18.2m. One of the unanswered questions in this somewhat quiet launch is why the work is being sold in London instead of New York where it would be expected to do well. Is this an indication of interest from Europe and Asia or a signal that Christie’s has fair amount of traffic in May or simply a feather in Francis Outred’s cap.

Only time will answer those questions. Until then, we have Christie’s catalogue information:

Jackson Pollock – Number 21, 1950 (1950), Estimate: £10,000,000-15,000,000

With its opulent, marbled galaxy of dripped, splashed and spattered paint, Number 21, 1950 is a beautiful and important work from the peak of Jackson Pollock’s iconic ‘drip period’. It was included in the artist’s seminal third solo show at the Betty Parsons Gallery, New York, which opened on 28 November 1950. Now recognised as the crowning moment of Pollock’s career, this exhibition contained several of his greatest large-scale masterpieces, all of which were painted that year: Number One, 1950 (Lavender Mist) (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.); Number 27, 1950 (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York); Autumn Rhythm (Number 30) (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York); One: Number 31, 1950 (Museum of Modern Art, New York); and Number 32, 1950 (Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf). Number 21,1950 was among thirteen square-format works in the exhibition. Each roughly 22 x 22 inches in size, these were painted on the reverse sides of Masonite boards given to Pollock by his elder brother Sande McCoy, a commercial screen printer who had a stock of panels left over from the manufacture of a baseball board game in 1948. Other examples of this singular, jewel-like series are held in major museum collections worldwide, including Number 15, 1950 (Los Angeles County Museum of Art), Number 16, 1950 (Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro), Number 17, 1950 (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York), Number 18, 1950 (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York), Number 20, 1950 (University of Arizona Museum of Art, Tucson), and Number 22, 1950 (Philadelphia Museum of Art).

Gagosian Tries to Jump Start Wesselmann Market with Still Lifes

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The Wall Street Journal’s Kelly Crow plugs Gagosian’s show of Tom Wesselmann’s large, late still lifes:

The gallery has gathered nine still lifes that the artist created between 1967 and 1981 but never showed together. MoMA lent one ofthe pieces from 1969-70, “Still Life #57,” but most of the others went unsold when they were initially shown and have remained in the artist’s estate.

Gagosian declined to say what it plans to ask for the still lifes in its show, but … a smaller, preparatory painting for one of the … pieces on view at Gagosian, 1981’s “Still Life with Belt and Sneaker,” sold at Sotheby’s in 2010 for $650,500.

A smaller, single-panel work from 1981, Still Life and Blue Jar and Smoking Cigarette, sold at Phillips in May 2015 for $1.385m which gives those interested a better sense of the pricing for these works.

Pop Artist Tom Wesselmann’s Larger-Than-Life Paintings Go On View  (WSJ)

Sotheby’s Closes the Gap in Contemporary as the Show Overshadows the Business

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This recap of the coverage of Sotheby's Impressionist and Modern Art Evening sale is available to AMMpro subscribers. Subscribers get the first month free of charge. Feel free to subscribe and cancel before you are billed.

One of the key complaints that led to the activist investment in Sotheby's was that the auction house had fallen behind its rival Christie's in putting on the all-important Contemporary art auctions. This week, coming off last season's surprise triumph with the Wilkes Basquiat and a year after the equally defiant success with the Ames estate, Sotheby's finally posted a Contemporary Art Evening sale total that was only 10% behind Christie's.

Nate Freeman of Artnews picked up on this statistic given out at Sotheby's post-sale press conference by auctioneer Oliver Barker.

If you compare contemporary to contemporary and remove the $450 million from the total, Christie’s totaled $338.6 million, just a bit higher than the total at arch-rival Sotheby’s tonight.

To be fair to both sides, Sotheby's posted $302.7m without the Ferrari Formula 1 car bringing it just into the same 3-handle as Christie's. But considering this season was dominated by estates which Christie's outbid the competition for, Sotheby's sales total is a validating triumph for the entire team.

It sure didn't feel like that during any of the week's Contemporary auctions. Across the board, the sales were characterized more by the monotony of a highly managed sale where works mostly get gaveled to a pre-arranged bidder. Sotheby's Gregoire Billault acknowledged this when he pointed out that Sotheby's had achieved a remarkable four New York Contemporary Evening sales in a row with a 90% sell-through rate. Billault is responsible for that hawk-eyed management but he certainly had help from Sotheby's COO Adam Chinn and the ever-watchful Amy Cappellazzo. All four of whom have been running the shop these last four sales cycles.

With the close sale management comes some risks. Art auctions share a bit with fashion shows.

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