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Action in the Old Masters Market in Unlikely Places 

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  • “It was a great sale. There’s life out there”, says New York dealer Robert Simon
  • As Munich dealer Martin Graessle sums it up: “It is easier today to sell a work for $1m than one for $10,000.”
  • Some prices, particularly for drawings, reached impressive levels.
  • “We had really deep interest from all over the world. That was not always the case in recent years”, says Christopher Apostle, the head of Sotheby’s Old Master paintings department. “Also, we had new bidders and younger bidders”.

The reactions to last week’s sale of Old Masters works primarily at Sotheby’s recorded by Barbara Kutscher in The Art Newspaper were hopeful. Buyers seemed to pursue works in unexpected places, especially in the drawings market where Christie’s also held a sale. As Kutscher points out, the collection of Howard and Saretta Barnet reached $16.8m, in part because of the strong participation of collectors:

The top lot—an extremely rare, heavily inked drawing of a landscape around Shoreham, Kent, by Samuel Palmer (around 1831)—was claimed by a New York collector, briefly challenged by the London dealer Stephen Ongpin, for a high $2m, or $2.4m with fees. The same buyer also won fiercely contested graphite and pencil drawings by Ingrès and Picasso. An exquisite brush drawing by Goya, showing an old woman hunched over a basket full of eggs, will make its way into a European private collection for $2.1m.

Colin Gleadell thinks the collector mentioned here is Leon Black.

That strong performance contributed to the overall total of $82.5m which was twice the total of the previous year which came in at $41.9m. Here are some of the strong performances from Sotheby’s various sales:Continue Reading

Seemingly Strong Old Master Sales Offer Mixed Interpretations

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The full narrative of the Old Master sales is available to AMMpro subscribers. Monthly subscriptions begin with the first month free. You are welcome to cancel your subscription before the end of the month and pay no fee.

There was a wide variety of reactions to the Old Master sales last week in London. Some saw the sales as a triumph of flashy cross marketing. Others saw the inherent value of the category asserting itself over time. It is clear that tastes are changing in the category. But the overall total of £118m with Sotheby's Evening sale achieving an 85% sell-through rate suggests the Old Master category is anything but left for dead.

Perhaps more to the point, the current structure of the art market where third-party guarantees stabilize prices, there's good reason to believe that pricing in the Old Master market has become fairly stable and predictable with some caveats surrounding holding times.

On the positive side, the major lots, a J.M.W. Turner German scene and a Guardi Venetian view, both sold within the reference points of recent, related sales. For the Guardi, the picture sold for pretty much the same price as its pendant which was sold six years ago. This is Bendor Grosvenor's point:

the Guardi ('The Rialto Bridge with the Palazzo dei Camerlenghi') saw much stiffer competition than the Turner, with bidding starting at £12m before hammering at £23.25m (£26.2m with premium). This price compares favourably to the value of the picture's 'pendant', View of the Rialto Bridge, from the Fondamenta del Carbon, which had sold at Sotheby's in 2011 for £26.7m (inc premium).

You can contrast that with The New York Times's Scott Reyburn who seems to have been entranced by a video Christie's made of the painting in situ. According to Reyburn's view, the key to selling Old Master works these days is to market them to Contemporary collectors who are used to paying more:

The Christie’s video was filmed during the opening days of the Venice Biennale, as that city hosted hundreds of wealthy contemporary art collectors. This kind of global marketing, along with the low estimate of £25 million, helped persuade the owner of Guardi’s 6 feet 8 inches wide canvas “Venice: the Rialto Bridge with the Palazzo dei Camerlenghi” to sell.

Except, it turns out the the £25m estimate wasn't attractively low at all. It was pretty much priced by the previous sale of the painting's pendant:

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The ‘Aesthetic of the Unfinished’ Pushes Rubens to Top of OM Paintings and Drawings Week in NYC

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Sarah P. Hanson has an excellent recap of this week’s Old Masters auctions and dealer exhibitions of drawings. She points out that David Tunick’s show of Gustav Klimt drawings that, she says, have not been seen for 37 years scored a sale to a new client who fell for a portrait of a woman done in blue pencil.

On the auction side, Hanson explains that Christie’s new drawing team was able to nearly double the dollar volume of their sale from $3.2m to $6.2m with nearly the same number of lots. That’s either an impressive commentary on the team or the market or both.

Hanson also points out that the top lot was Rubens study that had been re-attributed and cleaned to show the “sketchy oil on canvas, evidence of Rubens’s famously quick hand.” Considering the popularity of unfinished works in both the Met’s recent show and Otto Naumann’s TEFAF sales, Sotheby’s was touting in its catalogue the ‘aesthetic of the unfinished.’ It seemed to work—mostly.

Here’s Hanson’s take:Continue Reading

Who Owns Authenticity in the Hals Case?

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We’re late to covering this New York Times summary of what is now known about the Hals painting now seen as a forgery. The Times has done a good job of assembling a narrative that gives us a better sense of what transpired, including the crucial fact that Giuliano Ruffini maintains he never made statements or gave warranties about the painting’s authorship.

The key to the story may lie in the way that the Louvre first discovered the work, through an application for an export license:Continue Reading

The Strange Case of the Caravaggio Discovery

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The Telegraph reports that the ebook claiming to have re-attributed a cache of works owned by the City of Milan as works by Caravaggio has been withdrawn from Amazon (though it remains for sale on lulu.com.)

The claim itself was outlandish but some of the reaction is ante-diluvian in its starched skepticism that any valid claim could be made outside of the academic establishment:

The withdrawal of the book raised questions about why the historians’ claims, which garnered worldwide media attention, had not been peer-reviewed. […] A panel of heritage experts from Castello Sforzesco, the castle where the archive of sketches and drawings is kept, would scrutinise “with rigour the ideas advanced by the authors of the e-book,” he said. […]

Maria Teresa Fiorio, the former director of the castle’s collection, said last week that she was “perplexed” by the claims made in the book. “A serious scholar doesn’t produce an e-book – they would publish their findings in the appropriate journals. Everyone who has studied the collection has asked themselves – is it possible that some were drawn by Caravaggio? No one has drawn that conclusion.”

The authors claim their work’s many images are essential to making their case. Of course, the publication and publicity surrounding it has generated exactly the sort of “peer review” one would want if your case was convincing.

Amazon Withdraws Controversial Caravaggio Book (Telegraph)

Paris Gets an Old Masters Fair

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The Antiques Trade Gazette reports on a new Old Master fair planned for Paris this Fall:

The fair, to be known as Paris-Tableav, will be held from November 4-8, a time preceeding Old Master auctions in Europe and one relatively free of other major fairs. The idea is to limit the event exclusively to Old Masters with a dateline of 1850 and to “put a little bit of art back into the Parisian marketplace”. […]

[Bob] Haboldt and the other committee members – Didier Aaron & Bruno Desmarest; Maurizio Canesso; Eric Coatalem; Jean Francois Heim; Georges de Jonckheere; Jacques Leegenhoek; Giovanni Sarti; Bertrand Gautier & Bertrand Talabardon and Claude Vittet – will each invite a guest participant from outside France, bringing the total number of exhibitors to 20.

Paris-Tableav: Dealers launch Old Masters fair (Antiques Trade Gazette)

Louvre Crowd Sources a Cranach Acquisition

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Photo credit: Reuters

The Louvre made the first steps toward truly making art held in museums a public trust by raising more than $1 million from individual donors to finance the acquisition of Lucas Cranach the Elder’s Three Graces which was being sold by a private collector to the museum for $5.2m. The work had not been seen in public and an appeal to donors raised the money to get over the top of the purchase price, according to the New York Times:

The museum had about $4 million from its budget and corporate donors, but it lacked the rest. Louvre officials made an appeal in a Web campaign beginning Nov. 13. They beat their deadline of Jan. 31 as more than 5,000 donors responded, mostly from France, but also from Belgium, Spain and the United States.

“We didn’t think this could happen so rapidly,” said Henri Loyrette, the Louvre’s director.

Contributors, through a Web site, made donations from a single euro to 40,000 euros ($52,700), with the average about 150 euros ($195). A number of French companies and foundations also gave. Many donors wrote notes to the Louvre, Mr. Loyrette said, expressing appreciation and offering money to honor loved ones.

5,000 Donors Help Louvre Buy a Painting (New York Times)

Beaverbrook v. Beaverbrook Sends Old Masters to Sotheby's

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The Beaverbrook Gallery’s loss is Sotheby’s gain as Carol Vogel publishes the firm’s announcement that it will sell a large number of works for the Beaverbrook Foundation which won a settlement over Lord Beaverbrook’s estate:

Although full details of the settlement are shrouded by a confidentiality agreement, the Beaverbrook Foundation won the title to 85 works, valued at more than $100 million, that were deemed by the court to be part of the first Lord Beaverbrook’s original collection. They include works by British masters like George Stubbs, Victorian and Edwardian paintings, and works by a variety of old masters. Sotheby’s confirmed that it would sell about 48 works in a series of auctions in London and New York, beginning with a sale of old master and British paintings in London on Dec. 8. The proceeds from the auctions will benefit the Beaverbrook Foundation, which supports architectural preservation, schools, the Samaritans and other causes.Continue Reading

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