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London Gives Some Second Thoughts About June Sales

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This wrap-up of the coverage of the June Contemporary sales 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 great surprise of the London Contemporary art sales was not the strong performance of works by younger artists or overlooked historical masters. Taken together, all four auction houses transacted somewhere around £186m with only a few of those works selling above £10m.

That trend within the art market continues to be pronounced and persistent. We'll have a more detailed discussion of the sales composition and performance when we publish our sales analysis in the next week. In the meantime, let's marvel at the unexpected strong performance of the Evening sales of Contemporary art in London just when it looked like these events were getting squeezed out of the calendar.

To be sure, the top of the market is much lower than it has been in the past for these sales. Sotheby's posted the biggest single lot with a guaranteed Lucian Freud reclining nude that sold for nearly $30m. Just below that was the surprise lot of the week, Jean-Michel Basquiat's untitled work sold from an American collection (said to be New Line's Michael Lynne) that composed a significant portion of Sotheby's sale. It made just below $20m but had carried a low estimate nearly half of the final selling price.

The dogged bidding over the Basquiat began with auctioneer Oliver Barker pushing the opening bids toward the low estimate. It wasn't long before two aggressive telephone bidders engaged in pitched campaign to out do each other. Their bids came either without the briefest hesitation or in increments greater than the crying required. The underbidder bowed out several times before finally capitulating.

In the current climate where high-value works are sold with an armature of financial support surrounding them which have a tendency to often but not always dampen bidding, it was a rare show of determination by two collectors.

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Christie’s Scores By Just Getting It Done

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Christie’s £128m Impressionist and Modern Evening sale in London, working off a similar estimate range as its rivals, was demonstration of the value of just getting things right. The two top lots, a Picasso and a rare example of Monet’s Gare Saint-Lazare series, sold without much excitement. But they sold at or around expectations which did no damage to the sale’s total. That opened the door for Christie’s to make great gains with two or three works that surprised to the upside.

The two most dynamic lots were a lifetime cast of Auguste Rodin’s Kiss which sold for £12.6m over a £7m high estimate and Franz Marc’s Drei Pferde sold for £15.4m over a £3.5m high estimate. The bidding battle on the Marc was as intense as it was unexpected topped only by the unusual fact that art dealer Jeffrey Loria took the additional step of having Christie’s inform the press that he had bought the work for his personal art collection (drawing a distinction from his other holdings that only raised more questions than it answered.)

The fact that outsized gains came from lots with more modest estimates further emphasizes that the top of the market is both fully priced and potentially spent out after the Rockefeller sale. The $700+m that was spent on Impressionist and Modern art in New York at the Rockefeller sale was effectively another major season of spending in the category inserted into the first half of the year.

The secret to Christie’s sale may have been Asian buyers who were mostly absent from Rockefeller but took up about a third of the London Evening sale, according to the auction house. Continue Reading

Christie’s Improves Its Imp-Mod Category Performance

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This look at the last 12 years of Christie's June Impressionist and Modern Evening sale performance 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.

Christie's had a stronger sale than Sotheby's but both events showed that the market for Impressionist and Modern art may have been affected by the tidal pull of the massive Rockefeller sale which featured a full sales season's worth of Impressionist and Modern art just a month before these auctions.

For many years, Christie's was the weaker player in the Impressionist and Modern market with results not unlike those seen at Sotheby's the night before. These last two  June sales cycles were quite different and echo the strong years of 2010 and 2011 when Impressionist and Modern art was seen as a long-term store of value.

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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

Modern Art Ascendant: London Imp-Mod Market Analysis

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Monet, Coucher de Soleil (200-300k) 1,568,750

This analysis of the London Impressionist and Modern auction sales results—made possible with data from our partners at Live Auction Art—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 London sales cycle of Impressionist and Modern art showed a resurgence in value in the category. When the Impressionist and Modern works included in Phillips sale held during the week of Contemporary art auctions are added to the Impressionist and Modern sales totals at Christie’s and Sotheby’s, the Impressionist and Modern category significantly out-performed Contemporary art.

Our numbers show almost £393m in total sales for Impressionist and Modern art in London which is nearly £50m more than the sales volume for Contemporary art (we’ll publish those numbers shortly.) Here the news is that more money was spent on Modern art. And the overall driver of that spending is the market for works by Pablo Picasso.

The market share numbers (shown below) make the case in the starkest manner. But first let’s address some high-level learnings from the sales.

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Christie’s Surprise Picasso Buyer and Other Tales From a Long Sale

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This recap of Christie's Impressionist-Modern and Surrealist Evening sale in London is available to AMMpro subscribers. Monthly subscriptions begin with the first month free. Feel free to subscribe and cancel before you are billed. 

Christie's Evening sales of Impressionist and Modern art as well as Surrealist art last night were a success by the numbers. The combined sales made £149.5m which was £13m more than the same sales a year before. If you are looking to those numbers to give you some sense of market direction or mood for what Christie's now calls the 20th Century art market, you ought to look elsewhere. The sales were punctuated with lots that were avidly pursued though price levels proved important. Estimates over £5m saw light bidding and after many seasons where the auction houses have actively managed their sales to present high sell-through rates, Christie's ran two large sales last night that they were more than willing to let 'sell-through' at only 78% of the works. Make no mistake, 78% is traditionally a solid, very business-like sale result. Only in the last few years of hyper-competition (with the added sense that the Impressionist and Modern market needed to project stability,) have the the sell-through rates consistently posted in the high 80s or low 90s.

We will have a more detailed analysis of the lot-by-lot sales in the next two weeks. For now, here are some impressions.

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The Mother of All Bradfords at Phillips in London + Another at Christie’s

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Melanie Gerlis’s column in the Financial Times has the announcement that Mark Bradford’s massive Helter Skelter I from 2007 will come to market in London next month:

The auction house has won a massive consignment from tennis legend John McEnroe in the form of Mark Bradford’s “Helter Skelter I” (2007), to be offered in London on March 8 (est £6m-£8m, third-party guaranteed). The price could more than double the Los Angeles artist’s record, though a work of this size (10 metres wide) has never come to auction before.

McEnroe worked with Josh Baer to buy the work four years ago just before the Bradford market saw substantial upward price movement. In 2014, Bradford’s top price was $2.6m. A year later, four works had traded publicly at higher prices all the way up to $5.8m which stands at the record price for the artist.

Since that time,  Bradford’s stature and visibility has only risen. Bradford represented the US at the Venice Biennale recently and the showing at the Hirshhorn in Washington, DC of the massive Pickett’s Charge.

Over at Christie’s, there will be a cheaper work, Bear Running from the Shotgun from 2014 which was last seen at Art Basel in Miami Beach in December of the same year. It’s estimated at £2.2-2.8m.

Christie’s Announces $80m Francis Bacon for Frieze

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Christie’s has another “barn find” of a painting that has been in the same family for 45 years and not been shown publicly:

Francis Bacon’s landmark painting Study of Red Pope 1962. 2nd version 1971, unseen in public for 45 years. It stands as the grand finale to his celebrated body of Papal portraits and is the only painting that unites the Pope with his greatest love George Dyer, who is depicted as the Pope’s reflection.  First exhibited on 26 October 1971, in the legendary retrospective of Francis Bacon’s work at the Grand Palais in Paris,Study of Red Pope 1962. 2nd version 1971 was executed six months earlier in April 1971. The painting represents the first and only time in his oeuvre that Bacon united his two greatest obsessions: the Pope and George Dyer – his great muse and lover. The canvas became a tragic premonition of Dyer’s fateful end when, less than thirty-six hours before the opening of the career-defining exhibition, Dyer was found dead. Acquired by the family of the present owner in 1973 this work has appeared in all the major publications dedicated to Bacon’s work but never exhibited publicly. Francis Bacon’sStudy of Red Pope 1962. 2nd version 1971 will come to auction as the centerpiece of Christie’s Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Auction on 6 October 2017 and will be on view at Christie’s King Street from 30 September.

Sotheby’s Solo Imp-Mod Sale in London = £148.9m

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(Photo by Tristan Fewings/Getty Images for Sotheby's)

This recap of Sotheby's London Impressionist and Modern sales is available to AMMpro subscribers. The first month subscription is free. You can cancel AMMpro at any time.

Sotheby's hybrid Evening sale of small works and Impressionist and Modern masterworks was an uneven success with some real surprises as the two sales tallied £127.9m for the Impressionist and Modern sale + £20.9m for Actual Size, the small works sale or £148.9m ($187.7m) combined. On a hammer basis, Actual Size failed to reach the low estimate while the Impressionist and Modern sale just reached the low estimate. The sell-through rates were 65% and 74% respectively for Actual Size and the Imp-Mod sale.

These numbers may reflect the state of estimates—especially when they are undergirded by actual buyers who took positions pre-sale with irrevocable bides—which are quite high and require a fair bit of work for the specialists to rally bidding interest. With estimates peaking, there are two likely outcomes for the category (Impressionist and Modern works, not small ones.)

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Christie’s Has $32m Picasso Marie-Thérèse Portrait for June

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Christie’s has a portrait of Marie-Thérèse for the June Impressionist and Modern sales in London:

Pablo Picasso’s tender portrait Femme écrivant (Marie-Thérèse) (1934, estimate: £25-40m) will be a leading highlight of Christie’s Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale, in London on 27 June 2017 as part of 20th Century at Christie’s, a series of sales that take place from 17 to 30 June 2017. Painted on 26 March 1934, Pablo Picasso’s Femme écrivant (Marie-Thérèse) is a joyous, colour-filled and deeply personal portrayal of Marie-Thérèse Walter, the young, blond-haired woman who, when she entered the artist’s life in January 1927, influenced the course of his art in an unprecedented manner. Femme écrivant is one of the greatest portraits of Marie-Thérèse, a radiant and intimate depiction of Picasso’s lover, which, along with the preceding paintings of the early 1930s, epitomises one of the finest phases in the artist’s career. The painting will be on view in Hong Kong from 5 to 9 of June 2017 before being exhibited in London from 17 to 27 June 2017.

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