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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

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 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.

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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Derain London View from Tate Show Goes to Christie’s

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Christie’s unveiled this morning a Fauve work for its London Impressionist and Modern sales at the end of the month:

André Derain’s Londres: la Tamise au pont de Westminster (1906-07, estimate: £6-9m) will star in Christie’s Impressionist and Modern Art Evening Sale on 27 February. One of 29 recorded paintings of London that Derain painted across 1906 and 1907, it comes to auction alongside the exhibition ‘Impressionists and London’ currently on view at London’s Tate Britain. Londres: la Tamise au pont de Westminster is captured from the Albert Embankment, portraying the Thames, the Palace of Westminster, Westminster Bridge and, in the background, the pyramidal silhouette of Whitehall Court. The painting will be on view in Hong Kong from 5 to 8 February and New York from 12 to 14 February 2018 before being exhibited in London from 20 to 27 February 2018.

Just a few months before he ventured to London, Derain had made his explosive debut into the Parisian art world when he was included in the Salon d’Automne of 1905. Derain’s work at the Salon caught the eye of one of Paris’ leading contemporary art dealers, the man who had, a few months earlier, introduced the artist to Matisse: Ambroise Vollard. Vollard became his dealer later that same year and it was his idea to send Derain to London and commission him to paint a series of cityscapes there. With Monet’s famous series of Thames views set firmly in his mind, over the course of his time in London, Derain travelled across the city in search of his subjects, sketching an array of different views. Unlike Monet, whose depictions of the city had centred around three specific viewpoints, Derain was not fixed to one specific location. Instead he captured the city from a range of positions, never returning to an identical subject twice in an attempt to challenge himself with each work. The notorious London fogs for which London was so well known, and under whose spell Monet had fallen, proved strangely elusive for Derain. As a result, Derain did not pursue the same muted, soft effects of light and colour that this atmospheric condition cast over the appearance of
the city, but rather focused on more radical formal experimentation.

Keith Gill, Head of Sale, Impressionist and Modern Art Evening Sale, Christie’s, London: “Among the most iconic works of Fauvism, many of this rare series of London paintings are now housed in museum collections across the world, including the Musée d’Orsay, Paris; Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and the Tate Gallery, London, where a selection of other works from this groundbreaking London series are currently on view in the exhibition, ‘Impressionists in London’. Following the widely acclaimed exhibition of Derain’s work of this period at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, we are honoured to present this rare Fauvist work in our Evening Sale in London.”

Sotheby’s Shows the New Hybrid Model Can Produce Strong Numbers During a Muted Sale

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This recap of Sotheby's Impressionist & Modern Evening sale is available to AMMpro subscribers. Subscriptions begin with the first month free. Subscribers are welcome to sign-up and cancel before the first billing cycle.

Sotheby's $296.6m sale of Impressionist and Modern art last night demonstrated the strength and weakness of the new model marquee sale. All three auction houses have adopted a hybrid model of selling that involves securing work with a mix of direct and third-party guarantees. In effect, a large portion of any visibility auction is now pre-sold in the weeks and months leading up to the sale. The auction itself gives a broader range of buyers the opportunity to weigh in.

Last night, we saw that most of the early deals were decent deals and the transactions went off as expected. This makes for strong sales totals, Sotheby's $296.6m is up 71% year over year as the auction house is only too happy to tell you, which convey the idea of a healthy market. It also happens to make for a fairly uneventful sale night. Without the prospect of drama, fewer onlookers and see-and-be-seeners show up. 

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Christie’s Brings Back the Heyday of Imp-Mod Sales with $479m Evening Sale

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This recap of the coverage of Christie'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.

The record for the highest dollar volume evening sale of Impressionist and Modern art was set in 2007 with a sale that brought in what seemed like an unsurpassable $491m. That year was thought to be the apex of the art market boom and a break-through moment in the public's consciousness that art was becoming extraordinarily valuable.

After the global financial crisis, the Impressionist and Modern category has witnessed the punctuated success of individual lots. The sales haven't quite dominated the way Contemporary art does. Last night at Christie's, due to the presence of several estates, the long evening of labored bidding with a few moments of spirited competition distracted from the fact that Christie's had assembled and executed a substantial achievement. Let's remember that Christie's has had a bumpy decade in this category where its greatest successes seemed to take place in curated sales.

Artnews's Nate Freeman notes that the two sales preceding this one hardly hinted at what might be coming for the category with the estate windfall:

In May of this year, the total was a respectable $289 million, but the same sale a year ago netted just $165 million

Last night, Christie's came terribly close to matching that record sale mostly without the kind of tense bidding that has punctuated some of it's bigger successes. The Bass van Gogh, like the sale itself, came close to matching the record price paid for a van Gogh 30 years ago. (Adjusting for inflation means the two sales are hardly comparable.) But everything about Christie's sale was quieter, more business-like and efficiently buttoned up.

This is what at least one dealer told Robin Pogrebin and Scott Reyburn of the New York Times:

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Christie’s Brings $65m Léger to New York Without a Guarantee

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This morning, Christie’s announced the auction of Fernand Léger work from 1913 that will set a new record for the artist, if this work that has never before been auctioned sells. The whisper number on the work is $65m, give or take, and it is being sold without a guarantee from the auction house or a third party. Clearly, the sellers are confident in the work’s market appeal.

The current top price paid for a Léger came in 2008 when La femme en bleu (study) from the same period made $39.2 million. Here’s Christie’s release explaining the work and its sale:

On November 13, 2017, Christie’s will present Fernand Léger’s Contraste de formes, 1913, the most important canvas by the artist offered at auction in several decades (estimate on request). This exquisite picture comes from Property from the Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Foundation, and proceeds from the sale of this work will go towards the foundation’s philanthropic mission. Originally acquired from Léger at the end of 1913 by his dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Contraste de formes was bought in 1956 from Galerie Rosengart in Lucerne by Ludmilla and Hans Arnhold, an international banker and art collector. The Arnholds later bequeathed the painting to their daughter and son-in law, Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen. Kellen was the CEO of the highly respected investment banking firm, Arnhold and S. Bleichroeder, Inc., as well as a distinguished collector and passionate philanthropist. The Kellens were deeply captivated by Léger and his work, often visiting the Musée National Fernand-Léger in Biot, France, with their children and eventually their grandchildren. Contraste de formes was a cherished highlight of the Kellens’ collection and it enriched their New York home for over 40 years.

November 13 will mark the painting’s first time at auction.

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