Art Market Monitor

Global Coverage ~ Unique Analysis

Montage Expects Three-Fold Return on Art Investment

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Forbes’s Keren Blankfeld spoke to Jim Hedges of Montage Finance which offers loans against art but also makes investments in art like this one:

His group’s latest significant investment was on a collection of hundreds of pieces of art for which they paid $20 million. The idea, he says, is to send the collection on tour in museums for a couple of years and make it better known, especially in places like Brazil and China, which are producing a growing number of enthusiastic art buyers. Hedges expects the rate of return for the entire collection to be three times over the entire holding period.

The Underground Art Economy (Forbes)

China Guardian Bests the West

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Beijing’s leading auction house China Guardian just wrapped up their 22nd edition of quarterly auctions: 2300 works of art sold (over three days) for $311 million. As Colin Gleadell notes in his roundup of market news, that puts China Guardian ahead of Western rivals Christie’s and Sotheby’s:

Beijing auctioneers China Guardian has thrown down the gauntlet to Sotheby’s and Christie’s highly successful Asian operations in Hong Kong with a $311 million series of art and antiques sales, placing them ahead of the Western auctioneers ($256 million and $293 million respectively) at the end of the spring auction series.

Art market news: Dealers at Art Basel sell fast (The Telegraph)

Portrait of a Portrait Artist

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Tonight, Sotheby’s offers Yuri Annenkov’s Portrait of Zinovii Grzhebin for £800,000 to £1,200,000. Grzhebin, the subject of the 1919 painting, was a prominent literary figure of Russia’s Revolutionary Era whose publications often featured collaborations with World of Art artists like Annenkov.

Although Annenkov completed portraits of numerous Russian cultural and political leaders, such works rarely appear on the market. The last comparable example to cross the block was Annenkov’s Portrait of Aleksandr Nikolaevich Tikhonov, which nearly doubled its high estimate, bringing £2,260,500 at Christie’s in 2007.

The estimate on the forthcoming Grzhebin portrait is about the same as the one carried by the Tikhonov portrait (the Grzhebin portrait‘s low estimate is £100,000 less, but the high estimate is the same). Will the Grzhebin portrait also mimic the Tikhonov portrait’s record-breaking performance? For more on Annenkov’s market and the fate of Sotheby’s cover lot, see the latest edition of The ART Report.

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Points for Style

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Russian art sales are typically a mishmosh of Russian periods and styles, and next week’s sessions at Christie’s, Sotheby’s and MacDougall’s are no exception. The earliest dated painting on offer is a waterfront scene from 1815 by Andrei Martynov, (offered at MacDougall’s with an estimate of £170,000 to £250,000) while the most recent, Valery Yershov’s Vigin Soil Upturned (at Sotheby’s for £12,000 to £18,000) dates to earlier this year (is the paint even dry yet?).

In terms of value, the sweet spot is really early 20th-century avant-garde art; the top three prices achieved at Russian art sales in the past five years went to 20th-century works conceived before 1930 by  esteemed members of the vanguard, Konstantin Somov, Natalia Goncharova and Alexander Iacovleff. When average prices and boom-era growth are taken in to account, however, avant-garde art is not the star of all Russian styles. To find out which styles—and specific schools—grew in value during the boom, see the latest edition of The ART Report.

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Russia's Post-Boom Blues

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Was Russian art’s recent influx in value just a boom-era phenomenon? Russian sales achieved most of their highest prices in 2007, when works like Konstantin Somov’s The Rainbow soared in the sales room, overthrowing their estimates by factors of two, three and sometimes even four.

Since 2007, however, both high and average prices in the category have ceased to climb. For analysis of Russian art’s current value, as well as a comparison between Russian art and art from other emerging markets, see the latest edition of The ART Report.

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