Art Market Monitor

Global Coverage ~ Unique Analysis

Sotheby’s Targets Fiduciaries with New Client Group

by

Sotheby’s is rebooting its Trusts and Estates department under the leadership of Valentino Carlotti to address the needs of fiduciaries, a broader group of professionals who help manage the assets of art collectors. Recognizing that art collections are managed by a range of financial and legal advisors in banks, family offices and law firms, the new department will be led by Mari-Claudia Jimenez. Jiménez has been promoted to Chairman of Sotheby’s Fiduciary Client Group & Valuations in the Americas. Here’s how Sotheby’s describes the new group:

The Fiduciary Client Group focuses on working with lawyers, bankers, family offices, and fiduciaries as they plan for the life cycle of their clients’ collection by:
  • assisting with valuations for charitable giving and estate planning purposes
  • crafting and spearheading sale and disposition strategies, and
  • preparing for significant collections that may be coming to market in the future.
The majority of the Fiduciary Client Group team are attorneys – the only such team in the field – so they understand the issues fiduciaries face. They are well positioned to creatively and pragmatically work with fiduciaries to maximize the value of the art and collectibles they are working with, taking into consideration the unique needs of fiduciaries before and after a collection is sold.
The team in the Americas is led Claire Robertiello, and includes Rebecca Lockwood, Alexandra Shorall Kelly, Samantha Anderson and Min Seo, and was also recently joined by Kara Popowich and Alexandra Duch.  Cassie Spencer is the Midwest Fiduciary Client Group representative and Hugh Hildesley continues his long tenure at Sotheby’s as Vice-Chairman, Senior Business Development.
In addition to the Fiduciary Client Group team in the Americas, Sotheby’s has launched a mirror department in Europe led by Maureen Hooft Graafland, whose background includes more than a decade as a Corporate Finance banker at JP Morgan in New York and London, as well as Laura McCarthy.  In Europe, the Fiduciary Client Group builds upon Sotheby’s successful Tax & Heritage practice, led by Wendy Philips.

Sotheby’s Hints at Strategy to Break Historic Valuation

by

This look at Sotheby's earnings for the third quarter of 2018 is available to AMMpro subscribers. Monthly subscriptions begin with the first month free. Feel free to subscribe and cancel before you are billed. 

Sotheby’s released its third quarter earnings report yesterday. Spanning the slow Summer months of July, August and September, the quarter rarely provides much in the way of directional information about the tone of the art market or the evolution of Sotheby’s strategy. Paradoxically, the absence of data usually allows or, even, requires Sotheby’s management to use their earnings call as a bully pulpit on their business.

Before we survey the color commentary Sotheby’s provided, there were some numbers worth paying attention to. For the first nine months of 2018, sales are up a solid 20% to $4.04bn. Half of that rise came from a 49% updraft in private sales to $675.4m. That puts the division on track towards a nice round $1bn in private sales. That number surely reflects the new-ish private sales division hitting its stride but also a quietly increasing industry trend away from public auction to private transactions.

Nowhere is that better seen than in the Warhol market where industry players insist four massive private sales have taken place behind the scenes while the 20th Century’s giant has all but vanished from the auction block.

Digging deeper into Sotheby’s numbers, one can see that auction sales are up in 2018 without relying upon Sotheby’s to empty its storerooms as the firm did in 2017. That means Sotheby's business improved markedly in 2018 without anyone really noticing. In the third quarter of 2018, Sotheby’s sold $6.5m of property that it already owned. These are works previously guaranteed that didn’t find buyers or inventory acquired in other ways. During the same period in 2017, that figure was more than 12 times that amount or $81m. For the nine months of 2018, inventory sales were $62.8m. The year before that figure was almost three times as high or $172m. Overall revenue was down but without an impact on the profit.

Sign up to Art Market Monitor Premium today

You need a membership to AMMpro to view this article and other exclusive content daily.

You can register today for $90 per month—with your first month free!—or for $756 per year (no free trial period.)

Screenshot 2016-08-05 16.28.45

If you already have an account, sign in here:

Henry Moore’s Family Group Maquette Leads Sotheby’s Mod Brit Sale

by

Not all of the big sales in November will be in New York. Sotheby’s has the maquette to Henry Moore‘s Family Group in its Modern & Post-War British Art Evening Sale in London on November 20th. The work is special for several reasons, it was held at New York’s MoMA for 33 years. It was bought by dealer Jeffrey Loria who held it for another 31 years before he sold it to a Japanese collector who is consigning it now. The maquette is fewer than 10 inches tall but the significance of the work and the value of Moore’s art having grown so much over the last several years the estimate is at between £1.3m and £1.8m.

Family Group was conceived in 1945 and cast by 1947 (just when Moore and his wife had their first and only child after many years of marriage). The maquette was acquired by MoMA in 1947.

Here’s more from Sotheby’s press department:

Immediately after WWII,  architect Eugene Rosenberg commissioned Moore to create a site-specific, large-scale sculpture for his project, the Barclay School in Stevenage, with which he was to win the Festival of Britain Architectural Award in 1951. The Barclay School was the first purpose-built comprehensive secondary school built in Britain after the war and Moore’s monumental version of Family Group was installed in 1950. The Barclay School Family Group, for which this is the maquette, was Moore’s first large-scale commission in bronze, a fundamental and seismic moment in his long and distinguished career.

Family Group is a symbol of all that Moore’s work stood for – a universal humanity distilled into the form of a family unit. The seventh of eight children of a coalminer and a coalminer’s daughter, Moore was born in an industrial town in Yorkshire to a strict and industrious father and a feminine and warm mother. And so, this work also has its roots in his earliest childhood experiences. At the same time, his work as an Official War Artist shines through, with the images of civilians sheltering from bombing raids in London, clinging together for comfort and warmth, and draped in blankets, were of fundamental significance to this final development. The sculpture is poised between Moore’s modernist sensibility for abstraction, present in the prominent ridges of the mother’s robes or the father’s Picasso-esque head, and touching naturalistic details. The outer shoulders of both mother and father curve gently inwards, and intimate protective stance that encloses their child and unifies the group. This particular cast was last exhibited in 1973, but the version of this edition in the Tate collection is currently on view, which is nice.

O’Keeffe Museum Offers Two Works in Sotheby’s Cont Evening Sale, One in American Art

by

A Street (1926) Oil on canvas 48 1⁄8 by 29 7⁄8 inches Estimate $12/18 million

Sotheby’s has a consignment of three Georgia O’Keeffe works from the O’Keeffe museum in Santa Fe that are being sold to plump up the museum’s acquisition. The works include a rare New York cityscape from 1926, a painting of Calla Lillies from later in the decade along with a vibrantly colored depiction of a cottonwood tree from the mid-1940s. These sales follow Sotheby’s success four years ago with Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1 which was purchased by the Crystal Bridges museum in Bentonville, AR for $44.4m, a huge step up in the record price paid for an artist who was a woman.

The highest value work of the three is one of the 20 cityscapes O’Keeffe painted during the late 1920s shortly after she married Alfred Stieglitz. Stieglitz cautioned O’Keeffe that the subject matter was too masculine compared to her work with flowers and landscapes. A Street carries a $12m low estimate. Calla Lillies on Red is estimated at between $8m and $12m; Cottonwood Tree in Spring is a comparative bargain at $1.5m to $2m.

Here’s Sotheby’s release on the three paintings:

On 14 November, Sotheby’s will present works by O’Keeffe in a Contemporary Art Evening Auction for the first time: A Street from 1926, one of the most psychologically penetrating paintings from the artist’s rare and distinguished series of New York cityscapes (estimate $12/18 million), and Calla Lilies on Red from 1928, a vibrant depiction of the flower with which O’Keeffe would become synonymous (estimate $8/12 million). Our American Art Auction on 16 November will feature Cottonwood Tree in Spring from 1943, which reveals the profound inspiration O’Keeffe gleaned from the American Southwest (estimate $1.5/2.5 million).

All three paintings are on public view this week in Sotheby’s Los Angeles galleries (16 & 17 October) and at SITE131 in Dallas’s Design District (19 October), as part of our tour of highlights from our marquee fall auctions. The full Contemporary Art and American Art sales will open for exhibition in Sotheby’s New York galleries on 2 November.

Robert A. Kret, Director of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, said: “Museum leadership, with the endorsements of the donors and Board of Trustees, selected these works to de-accession after very careful and thoughtful consideration. Removing an artwork from the collection is never an easy thing for any museum to do, but it is an integral part of good collections management to continually build and refine our holdings.”

Cody Hartley, the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum’s Senior Director, Collections and Interpretation, said: “A Street, Calla Lilies on Red, and Cottonwood Tree in Spring represent some of O’Keeffe’s most beloved subjects. They are bold, strong, wonderful paintings that epitomize everything that made Georgia O’Keeffe a master of American Modernism.”

Grégoire Billault, Head of Sotheby’s Contemporary Art Department in New York, said: “Georgia O’Keeffe remains one of the most singular artistic voices of the last century – nothing looks like an O’Keeffe – and the diversity of this particular group of paintings touches upon the breadth and depth of her iconic career. Her images are not only an essential part of American culture, but are now appreciated on an international stage among the great works of her time. We are thrilled to present these superb paintings in a new and wider context this November, sparking dialogues between O’Keeffe’s work and that of artists spanning the 20th and 21st centuries. It is a great privilege for Sotheby’s to work with the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum again this fall.”

In May 2014, Sotheby’s sold Georgia O’Keeffe’s iconic flower painting Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1 to benefit the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum’s Acquisitions Fund. The painting achieved a remarkable $44.4 million, setting a world auction record for any work by a female artist that still stands today. Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1 now resides in the collection of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, and was the star of the blockbuster retrospective Georgia O’Keeffe at the Tate Modern and Art Gallery of Ontario in 2016–17.

Calla Lilies on Red (1928) Oil on canvas 32 1⁄8 by 17 1⁄8 inches Estimate $8/12 million

Between 1918 and 1932, Georgia O’Keeffe created more than 200 flower paintings. But it was arguably in the calla lily that the artist found her ideal motif, one that provided the perfect synthesis of subject and form that now defines her most celebrated work. O’Keeffe painted Calla Lilies on Red in 1928. She would ultimately depict the calla lily eight times in this period, both in oil and pastel, revisiting the blossom on each occasion with a new viewpoint or altered perspective. In the present work, she emphasizes the verticality of the flower’s delicate form by presenting an elongated picture plane with its sensuous petals at center. She utilizes vibrant hues of red and green, which contrast dramatically the white flower, to imbue the canvas with energy and vitality, and emphasizes the simple elegance of the flower’s curves by reducing extraneous details.

Cottonwood Tree in Spring (1943) Oil on canvas 30 by 36 inches Estimate $1.5/2.5 million

O’Keeffe started to visit New Mexico regularly in 1929 when, in an effort to escape city life, she left New York to spend the summer there. While the stark simplicity and expansiveness of the desert landscape always strongly appealed to O’Keeffe’s artistic sensibilities, this particular trip proved transformative for her both personally and artistically. Works such as Cottonwood Tree in Spring reveal the profound inspiration O’Keeffe gleaned from the American Southwest. The sublime beauty of the landscape provided a free range for her imagination, and she would continue to investigate its imagery for the remainder of her life, returning almost every summer until 1949 when she made Abiquiu her permanent home. While the artist had always utilized the natural world as the basis for her unique visual language, in New Mexico her art gained an even deeper intimacy and, in works such as Cottonwood Tree in Spring, it transcends a literal study of nature to evoke the spiritual connection she felt with her adopted home.

Sotheby’s Goes (RED) Again at Art Basel in Miami

by

http://www.juliancassady.com

Ten years after the first (RED) auction was organized at Sotheby’s by Bono and Damien Hirst, the band is getting back together. This time, Theaster Gates and Sir David Adjaye are the organizers bringing in artists like Teresity Fernandez, Sean Scully, Marilyn Minter, Wangechi Mutu and Jeff Koons:

Theaster Gates and Sir David Adjaye will collaborate with Bono to curate the third (RED)Auction to support the fight against AIDS.

Centered on the theme of light and the color red, the collection of contemporary art and design will be auctioned by Sotheby’s during Art Basel in Miami Beach and Design Miami/ on the evening of 5 December 2018 – including global bidding that will be available live online and by phone. The auction will be preceded by a public exhibition presented by Gagosian at the famed Moore Building, which will open on World AIDS Day (1 December).

Artists donating works to the auction include Jeff Koons, Ai Weiwei, Wangechi Mutu, Sir Jony Ive and Marc Newson (who curated the second (RED) Auction), Christo, Sean Scully, Marilyn Minter, Frank Gehry, Guillermo Kuitca and Teresita Fernández, among others. In addition, Sir David Adjaye and Theaster Gates will create unique pieces for the sale.

The December event follows two previous (RED) Auctions conducted by Sotheby’s, which together raised $68 million. The first, organized by Bono and Damien Hirst in February 2008, featured works donated by Hirst, Banksy, Anish Kapoor, Marc Quinn, Georg Baselitz and Howard Hodgkin, among others, and established 17 new auction records. The second, curated by Jony Ive and Marc Newson in 2013, offered important 20th– and 21st-century design, and attracted matching funds for the AIDS fight from The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

To date, (RED) has generated more than $500 million for the Global Fund to support lifesaving HIV/AIDS programs in Africa. Proceeds from this year’s auction will continue to support community-based programs in Africa through the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, while also providing assistance to the HIV fight through community-strengthening programs in Chicago with the Rebuild Foundation – an organization championed by Theaster Gates.

Portraits of King Charles I’s Children Lead Sotheby’s December Old Master Sale

by

Sotheby’s announced last week two portraits by Anthony van Dyck to lead their December Old Master Evening sale in London. Two of King Charles I’s children are depicted in these consignments from a collection that has held the works for almost 100 years. The more valuable portrait is of King Charles II while he was Prince of Wales (£2-3m); his younger sister’s portrait has a £600-800k estimate. The works are interesting for their long provenance, the depiction of the future king and the fact that they were among van Dyck’s last works and may have never emerged from his studio. Sotheby’s feels these attributes might help buck the currents running against van Dyck in the marketplace.

Nine years ago, the van Dyck market hit an all-time high with the sale of the artist’s last self portrait from the same period as these works. The painting had been in the same hands for three centuries. It was offered with a £2-3m estimate but was bid up to £8.3m premium or more than $13.5m. That year and the next there were other strong sales including a study of a bearded man that made $7m.

The last work offered at this level, in April of this year, was a portrait of François Langlois that Christie’s hoped would make $2-4m but sold for $1.8m premium.

The year before, Saint Sebastian After His Ordeal was estimated at £1.2-1.8m and sold for a premium price of £1.9m also at Christie’s. Perhaps more relevant to this discussion was the portrait of these two children’s mother painted by van Dyck. In 2015, Sotheby’s offered a portrait of Queen Henrietta Maria which failed to find a buyer. Here’s Sotheby’s release on the two portraits:

Two portraits of Charles I’s eldest children – the eleven year-old Prince of Wales, (later King Charles II), and his nine year-old sister Mary, the Princess Royal, (later, the mother of the future king, William III) will be among the highlights of Sotheby’s London Old Master Evening sale on 5 December. Among the very last works that Van Dyck painted for his royal patron, these charming, beautifully preserved portraits have been in the same private collection for nearly a century, and come fresh to market with a combined estimate of £2.6 million – 3.8 million.

Conceived and executed in the summer of 1641, months before the artist’s death in December the same year, it is possible that they are the portraits of the Prince and the Princess recorded as being among the possessions left in the artist’s studio in Blackfriars on his death. Epitomising the extraordinary skill which Van Dyck brought to child portraiture, a genre in which he had excelled ever since his early years in Genoa, both works provide a penetrating likeness of the royal children at a time when their world, and the Stuart monarchy, was on the brink of collapse.

Alex Bell, Sotheby’s Co-Chairman of Old Master Paintings, said: “Van Dyck was responsible for creating the enduring images of Charles I and his court, and in these exceptionally well-preserved portraits of his two eldest children we see the artist use his painterly skill to acknowledge both the youth and the status of his royal subjects. The tumultuous history of the Stuart court has always captured people’s imagination and with the additional interest sparked by the fascinating exhibitions in London this year, it is particularly timely for these royal portraits, which are extremely rare to the market, to come up for sale.’

Appointed ‘Principal Painter in Ordinary to Their Majesties’ in 1632, Van Dyck created numerous portraits of Charles I, his wife Henrietta Maria, and their children, many of which still remain in the British Royal Collection. Depicting his sitters with a relaxed elegance and understated authority, Van Dyck’s sophisticated style dominated English portraiture until the end of the 18th century.

Portraying the eldest child of Charles I, the Portrait of Charles II, when Prince of Wales(estimate: £2-3 million) is a unique likeness of the young prince and one of the finest royal portraits of Van Dyck’s late career. Depicting the future heir to the throne standing in armour with the ribbon of the Garter, with his left hand resting on the hilt of his sword and his right on the head of a stick, this portrait marks a distinct shift in the representation of the young Prince. Moving away from the celebrated child portraits painted alongside his siblings, the portrait exudes a more martial and adult gravitas, both in accoutrements and bearing.

It is not known when the king gave the commission to paint such an important portrait of the Prince of Wales but the painting can probably be associated with a payment for the Prince’s barge, which on 9 August 1641 had ‘caryd his highness from Lambeth to Whithall and from thence to Sr Anthonye Vandickes and back again.’

Although he was still very young, the Prince of Wales accompanied his father, Charles I, at the outbreak of the English Civil War, and was present at the battle of Edgehill in 1642. When by 1646 it was clear that his father was losing the war, Charles was made to flee England and take refuge on the continent. Following the king’s execution, Charles lead a number of unsuccessful campaigns to recover his throne. Following the death of Oliver Cromwell in 1658 and the reformed parliament’s decision to restore the monarchy, Charles returned to England in 1660 as King Charles II.

Painted shortly after her marriage to Prince Willem of Orange, the Portrait of Mary, Princess Royal and Princess of Orange (estimate: £600,000 – 800,000), is the last of the artist’s likenesses of the young princess. It is one of three versions of the design, all most likely to have been painted in the summer of 1641. Mary is depicted wearing a fine orange silk dress edged with lace tied with blue ribbon, and both her wedding ring and the large diamond brooch given to her by her husband the day after their wedding on 2 April 1641. By this date Van Dyck was probably too unwell to finish the picture himself for it seems probable the painting of the Princess’ costume was entrusted to his studio.

Following her marriage aged just nine years old, the Princess remained in London until February 1642, when she travelled with her mother to Holland to join her husband. She returned to England at the Restoration but died shortly thereafter. Her son, Willem III of Orange, later succeeded her brother Charles II and was crowned King William III of England in 1689.

Sotheby’s Unveils $30m Marsden Hartley Berlin Abstract

by

Six years ago, MoMA mounted its striking and unconventional show “Inventing Abstraction: 1910-1925” which opened with the unconventional choice of four works by Marsden Hartley from his Berlin series. The whole of the series was assembled two years later at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin for a show that Roberta Smith described as confirming Hartley’s world-class status:

Before Jasper Johns or Jackson Pollock, there was Marsden Hartley, America’s first great modern painter of the 20th century. He achieved this distinction in Paris and most of all in Berlin between early 1912 and late 1915. There he produced a stream of paintings that synthesized Cubism and other European modernisms, mixed in non-Western motifs and mysterious symbols and culminated in his lusty, elegiac German Officer paintings

One of the missed opportunities of this season’s estates was the Berlin, No. 49 painting owned by Barney Ebsworth that was donated to the Seattle Art Museum as consolation for the estate’s decision to sell Ebsworth’s legendary American art collection. Any collector gnashing their teeth at missing out on one of the rare Berlin works still in private hands will rejoice this morning to learn that Sotheby’s has Ed and Deborah Shein’s Pre-War Pageant (1913-15) which was shown at Washington, DC’s National Gallery in 2010. There’s talk of one of these works trading on the private market for $20m or more. That might explain the $30m estimate. The rarity of the work, with Ebsworth’s example going to a museum precious few are left in private hands, also commands such a strong price. Here’s Sotheby’s release on the work which will sell in New York on November 12th:Continue Reading

Sotheby’s Earnings Down on One-Time Setbacks

by

This look at Sotheby's earnings for the first half of 2018 is available to AMMpro subscribers. Monthly subscriptions begin with the first month free. Feel free to subscribe and cancel before you are billed. 

Sotheby's earnings call and financial filings this morning offered their usual periodic window into the company's inner workings, priorities, successes and weaknesses. The headline from the call which had an impact on Sotheby's stock (BID) knocking 10% off the price as trading opened before recovering to around the $50-level for the rest of the day.

The stock was impacted by the news that although sales were up (22%) for the first half of 2018 over 2017's total, income was down (26%.) More to the point, Sotheby's commission margins, which had been improving steadily over the last three years, dropped from 16.7% last year to 15% this year. Sotheby's was upfront that the fall in commissions could be attributed to two works sold in the first semester of 2018.

It didn't take much to surmise that the two works mentioned were the Modigliani sold in New York and the Picasso Marie-Thérèse sold in London. On the call, CEO Tad Smith was quick to point out that one of the works made the company money even if it had an out-sized influence the commission margin while the other was simply mis-priced. (That's a polite way of saying the company made a mistake.)

This is startling level of transparency from an auction house about their guarantee book. Those who pay attention to the auction houses might be asking themselves why. 

Sign up to Art Market Monitor Premium today

You need a membership to AMMpro to view this article and other exclusive content daily.

You can register today for $90 per month—with your first month free!—or for $756 per year (no free trial period.)

Screenshot 2016-08-05 16.28.45

If you already have an account, sign in here:

Sotheby’s Income Down 23%, Commission Margins Take Hit

by

Sotheby’s filed with securities regulators this morning. Their second quarter net income was down 26% and the overall drop in the first half of 2018 was 23%. The company shows different percentage drops in earnings per share because of the effects of their stock buyback program which still has $133m left to deploy (and the firm indicates it will use the money to support the stock) as well as a very strong balance sheet of $400m in cash, including the $133m.

One of the prime metrics for Sotheby’s success over the last three years has been its steadily improving auction margins. Commission margins were dealt a setback in these results. Sotheby’s offers two explanations. One is that there were a number of large estates on the market which give the seller greater negotiating leverage. But the bulk of the decline was caused by the sale of two guaranteed works that had an out-sized impact. (We will have a discussion of these sales in a later report for AMMpro subscribers.)

Here are some excerpts from Sotheby’s release this morning:

For the three months ended June 30, 2018, Sotheby’s reported net income of $57.3 million, or $1.08 per diluted share. These results represent a decline of 26% from $76.9 million and 24% from $1.43 per diluted share in the prior year period partly due to the movement of certain Spring Hong Kong sales into the first quarter of 2018 that have historically been held in the second quarter.

For the six months ended June 30, 2018, Sotheby’s reported net income of $50.8 million, or $0.95 per diluted share, a 23% and 21% decline from the prior period, respectively. Excluding certain items, Adjusted Net Income* for the first half of 2018 was $63.0 million, or Adjusted Diluted Earnings per Share* of $1.18. These results represent a decline of 5% from $66.1 million and 3% from Adjusted Diluted Earnings per Share* of $1.22 in the prior year period.

Results for the second quarter and first half of 2018 were impacted by a decline in Auction Commission margin to 14.1% and 15%, respectively. In the second quarter of 2018, the art market was driven by competitive high-value consignments from fiduciary sources such as estates, foundations and charities. Accordingly, when compared to the prior year periods, our Auction Commission Margin was reduced by a higher level of auction commissions shared with consignors in these situations.

The comparison of Auction Commission Margin to the prior year periods was also negatively impacted by buyer’s premium used to offset auction guarantee shortfalls and fees incurred in respect of auction guarantee risk sharing arrangements. In particular, the current year periods were negatively impacted by the sale of two guaranteed paintings, which collectively reduced our Auction Commission Margin by 1.4% and 1.1% during the three and six month periods, respectively.

Sotheby’s Sales Reach $3.5bn in H1 2018

by

Sotheby’s reported their first half sales this morning with a 22% increase to $3.5bn in the first half of 2018 and an 80% sell-through on all lots. The company continues to be a private sales powerhouse with those transactions rising at a much greater rate, 63%, than auctions. Private sales were $543m for the first half of 2018.

Sotheby’s offered some highlights from those numbers:

  • Approximately 80% of the more than 23,000 lots offered in the first half of 2018 sold,
    continuing our strong performance on behalf of our consignors.
  • We continue to grow the number of new buyers at Sotheby’s:
  • In the first half of 2018, approximately one third of total buyers were new to the
    Company, and
  • 19% of our total hammer in that same period came from new buyers, which is up five points from the prior three years.
  • Asia also continues to be a success story– our Aggregate Auction Sales in Asia for the first half of 2018 totaled $488 million, up 15%, and with a strong sell-through rate of 90% and 21 world auction records set.
  • In the first half of 2018, Asian clients accounted for 28% of our Aggregate Auction Sales and purchased eight of the top 20 lots sold at Sotheby’s year-to-date.
  • We are also encouraged by the growth of new clients – in the first half of 2018, 28% of buyers were new to Sotheby’s Asia and, coincidentally, 28% was also the growth rate of Asian clients buying Western art.

twitterfacebooksoundcloud
Privacy Policy
Terms & Conditions
Advertise on Art Market Monitor