Art Market Monitor

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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.

 

Christie’s Milan Contemporary = €13.3m

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Here are some highlights of Christie’s sale in Milan this week, we’ll have more analysis of the sale for AMMpro subscribers next week.

Who Buys Italian in London?

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Alberto Burri, Sacco (1.8-2.5m) 2.99m GBP

Colin Gleadell takes a closer look at Christie’s Italian sale which posted the largest total of any London Italian sale at £26.89m:

Among the buyers was the Tornabuoni gallery from Paris, which bought a six-sided painting by Lucio Fontana for £818,500; and New York dealer Neal Meltzer, who bought an encrusted white canvas by Alberto Burri for a double-estimate £626,500. Marc Glimcher and Mollie Dent Brocklehurst of the Pace Gallery were eventually outbid as a neon and photographic work by the arte povera artist Mario Merz sold above estimate for £578,500, one of the highest prices for his work. The same work sold nine years ago for £130,000. […] The top lot was an historically important work by Burri, dated 1953, in which sections of canvas sacking were sewn together like a collage, which sold to Meltzer for £3 million, close to a record for the artist who is due a major retrospective at the Guggenheim in New York in 2015. Slashed canvases by Fontana were in plentiful supply, with buyers of the top lots having to outbid shrewd London dealer Ezra Nahmad to secure them.

Art Market News: contemporary Italian art auctions up the ante (Telegraph)

Arte Povera to Star at Sotheby’s Italian Sale

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Sotheby’s announces the sale of a major collection of Italian art that will commence with the Italian sale during Frieze week in London and proceed through 2012.

Italian Identity will be offered in Sotheby’s annual 20th Century Italian Art Sale on Thursday, October 13, 2011, represents all of the major developments in Italian Avant-garde art and is highlighted by the most comprehensive group of ‘Arte Povera’ ever to come to the open market. The collection, which includes pieces by Giorgio de Chirico, Giorgio Morandi, Alberto Burri, Piero Manzoni, Alighiero Boetti and Michelangelo Pistoletto, is estimated to realize in excess of £7 million.

Italian Identity Collection PR FINAL

Italian Art Continues to Gain Ground in London

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Georgina Adam’s Financial Times column makes this startling announcement: there hasn’t been a gallery in London that specializes in modern Italian art. That despite the consistent success at auction in London of Fontana, Manzoni, Burri and many other Italian artists.

But Imago, in a smart townhouse in Clifford Street, is rectifying that. It is run by Daniele and Elisabetta Pescali – he is the third generation of a family of well-established Milan art dealers. Their new show spans a century of Italian art, 1906-2008 and features a range of works. Some are by the best-known names on the international art market, and include Modigliani (his 1915 portrait of the art dealer Guillaume Chéron is priced at £3.5m); Fontana, Morandi, de Chirico and Marini.

Young Turks and Old Rivalries (Financial Times)

Souren Melikian Reads Persian, Do You?

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The International Herald Tribune’s Take on the October Auctions

You might know that Souren Melikian is a scholar of Iranian cultural history. However, he doesn’t tell the readers of the IHT as he castigates the auctioneers for not having translated the Persian on an Alighieri Boetti work in one of the Italian sales. Better to preserve his omniscience.

But there is a serious side to Melikian’s pretzel logic. Melikian seems to believe works of art have a definitive value. If art prices do not conform to the values he has assigned them, it must be the result of a nefarious influence. In Dr. Melikian’s universe, the culprits are the auction houses:

The auction market just delivered an unexpected message. Money remains available for art, lots of it, but the buyers are now calling the shots, not the sellers. Particularly not the auction houses, which have been playing a risky game for years in encouraging an artificial inflationary drive. [ . . . ] In just 10 days, auction houses thus received splendid news – money for art miraculously remains abundant – and a severe warning. Stop the old game of relentlessly hiking estimates in the hope that bullish buyers will meekly go along. Count yourselves lucky that buyers are still there, occasionally even bullish. But meek, they are no more, nor will they be for quite some time.

Why art dealers are not included in this matrix of inflation–let alone the over-eager buyers all-too-willing to race around art fairs as soon as raise their paddles–Dr. Melikian does not explain. But his understanding of economics needs to rise to the levels of his erudite taste and linguistic skills.

The auction houses can be accused of aggressively encouraging collectors to sell. Whether they offer guarantees or attach unrealistic estimates, there is nothing an auction house or art dealer can do to force someone to buy. Grandiose estimates and bullish guarantees are punished by the same mechanism–a failed sale. (Though peple forget that bought-in lots can actually work out in the end.)

But the point is that price is a mechanism of distribution, not a moral category. Prices in the months and years to come will be determined more by the available stock of money in the world (there’s a lot less today than there was two months ago) than by auction house experts.

Cool-headed buyers are now running the show (IHT)

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