Art Market Monitor

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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. Continue Reading

The November Impressionist & Modern Sales 2007-18

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This detailed analysis of the November Impressionist and Modern Evening sales over the last 12 years was provided by our friends at Pi-eX. It is available to AMMpro subscribers. Subscriptions begin with a free month for the curious.

The November Impressionist and Modern sales seemed to leave many disappointed. It was true that many lots struggled against seller’s expectations. But the total for the sales was among the best over the last dozen years. Looking at these charts provided by Pi-eX, you can see the that this year’s hammer totals were in the same range as those of 2014 (though remember that we’re comparing like sales and excluding some of the curated and single-owner collections.) Only 2007 and 2017 have exceeded the totals of this year.

This year was also among the sales where works over $10m accounted for the greatest proportion of the sale total but still behind 2017, 2007 and 2014.Continue Reading

Impressionist-Modern Market Tacks Away from Obvious Names

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This round-up of the reporting on the November Impressionist and Modern Evening sales is available to AMMpro subscribers. We will have a detailed report on the sales based on lot data next week. 

Anticipating the art market is never easy. This season, the Impressionist and Modern market was particularly hard to read. Christie’s ran sale with heavy emphasis on the big names—Picasso, Monet, Giacometti—that drive the Imp-Mod market; Sotheby’s tacked off in a different direction with a mix of Expressionist and other names that don’t normally carry a sale in this category. Christie’s managed their sale to a solid sell-through rate at the cost of a strong headline number; Sotheby’s pulled off strong sales for its most important offerings (save one) and seemed to abandon the latter quarter of the sale to market forces and consignor pride achieving a strong sale number with a devil-may-care sell-through rate of 75%.

At both houses, the bidding was fractured, halting and wary. Buyers were happy to slice the salami in thin bidding increments or hold their fire until another bidder showed his or her hand. All of that suggests the high asset value Impressionist and Modern market is burdened by seller expectations. In response, buyers are staging something of a strike.

That is, the buyers who were not engaged in attention-seeking stunts. Several reporters were charmed by the collector who brought his dog to Christie’s auction. But when Judd Tully tried to speak to the buyer of two works, he got this reaction:Continue Reading

Looking for Signs in Sotheby’s £87.5m London Imp-Mod Evening Sale

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(Photo by Chris J Ratcliffe/Getty Images for Sotheby’s)

Sotheby’s Impressionist and Modern Evening sale in London came in under expectations last night with £87.5m in sales where both top lots, a Picasso portrait of Marie-Thérèse Walter from 1932 and Giacometti’s cat previously owned by the Brody family in Los Angeles, sold for prices that fit with the tone of recent sales in the category.

The sale was down about a third over the previous year’s event with the very top lots accounting for much of the shrinkage, although in this year’s outing there was a good £20m in lost sales volume due to buyers just not showing up.

The Impressionist and Modern market remains both selective and top-heavy but last night’s sale also seemed to fit into some recent themes where the very top works failed to spark interest. As with the New York cycle of sales, bidders focused on particular works that were not necessarily the most highly valued.

The Picasso sold for £27m ($36m) which is a price in line with recent sales of similar works from the same year like the smaller but more striking Le Repos which Sotheby’s sold for a similar price in May. Although Phillips generated a much higher price ~$57m for another 1932 work just a few months before in London, it is not an uncommon pattern to see very strong prices followed by a declension as successive sales satisfy existing demand rather than generating new buyer interest.Continue Reading

Christie’s Follows Near-Record Van Gogh with Another Work in May

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Christie’s recently announced Vue de l’asile et de la Chapelle de Saint-Rémy, 1889, by Vincent van Gogh (estimate in the region of $35 million) as one of the lead lots for its Impressionist and Modern sales in New York this May. The work was once owned by Elizabeth Taylor whose father, art dealer Francis Taylor, bought the picture for her in 1963 at auction for £92,000.

The painting comes to market, in part as a response to Christie’s sale last November of van Gogh’s Laboureur dans un champ, from the Bass collection which made $81.3 million against its original estimate of $50 million. Because this price was was just shy of the auction record for the artist, the van Gogh market has perked up more than a bit. Christie’s makes clear in its marketing materials the relationship between the two works:

Approximately one month after depicting Laboureur dans un champ, which nearly eclipsed the artist’s record in November, Vincent painted Vue de l’asile et de la Chapelle de Saint-Rémy. Unlike the canvas of the ploughman, which had been rendered indoors and from memory, he painted the chapel en plein air.

This luminous painting was included in several of Van Gogh’s most important early exhibitions. These groundbreaking shows, including the 1905 retrospective at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, were instrumental in the formation of his posthumous reputation. Having seen this painting in the landmark 1905 Van Gogh retrospective at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Paul Cassirer, the leading German gallerist of the time, placed it immediately afterwards in his own traveling exhibition, which alerted the German public, art critics, historians, and contemporary painters alike to the achievement of an artist who was rapidly achieving legendary status.

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