NY’s ‘chaotic’ mega auction season ends on a mixed note
By James Tarmy
AS SOTHEBY’S contemporary evening sale wound down last Thursday night, , the company’s chief executive officer (CEO), stood in the back of the room with a look of undisguised relief.
Up until that evening, New York’s (NY) spring auction week, during which پ’s, Phillips, and dzٳ’s , had been a grind. Most of the art was selling, but often with notably meager bidding, particularly when prices were over the $5-million mark. On Thursday, though, the room came alive with real, aggressive competition for works from the and the artist Roy Lichtenstein. “This has been, I think, the high point of the week,” Mr. Stewart said. “If you want to feel good about the art market, this is the night, and this is the sale.”
A less encouraging evening session had occurred in that very same room just two nights before.
That Tuesday, during dzٳ’s modern evening auction, the most expensive lot of the sales series — a painted bronze bust by Alberto Giacometti that carried a $70-million estimate — . Over three excruciating minutes, the auctioneer Oliver Barker tried to solicit a winning bid, but finally he’d had enough. The work failed to sell (“a pass,” in auction parlance), immediately setting off audible chatter throughout the otherwise hushed salesroom. “Obviously, we would have preferred that it be [sold],” says Mr. Stewart. “But it was a real auction moment.”
A ‘CHAOTIC’ WEEK
Needless to say, this week did not exactly herald the return of a frenzied art market. “The Giacometti moment doesn’t necessarily speak to any kind of wider trend, it’s really a one-off moment,” says , an art advisory specialist at UBS. “But it was a sort of punctuation mark on what has been two years of a really tough cycle for the auction houses.”
Yet there were signs the market may have turned a corner. “This season our totals are higher than last May, and we’re on target to beat November,” says پ’s CEO . “So the doom and gloom of ‘Oh, the market’s down’? Well, the numbers tell a different story.”
Overall, it was a week that was neither good nor bad, with success or failure varying from lot to lot. “It’s really hard to come up with one real, driving theme behind all of this — it all feels pretty chaotic,” Mr. Newton says. “You saw individual collectors choosing to buy individual works and willing to skip out on others.”
پ’s estimated it would sell between $600 million and $811 million worth of art over the week, and it managed to total a solid $693 million. (Estimates don’t include auction house fees known as buyer’s premiums, but totals do, making it easier for auction houses to hit those projections.) Thanks in large part to the $70-million hole made by the Giacometti, dzٳ’s had a tougher time. It sold at least $400 million worth of art last week, a total that would increase after its Friday contemporary day sales were completed; its pre-week estimates were $485 million to $673.5 million. Phillips, meanwhile, totaled about $73.5 million, just missing its low estimate of $74.7 million.
THE TOP LOTS
The market for $10-million-plus artworks is always thin, but last week it felt particularly emaciated.
“The greatest depth of bidding that we saw this week was in the [lower-priced] day sales, in the $1-million to $10-million range,” says Ms. Brennan. “We have a much more cautious audience at the $20-million-plus level, and it really requires strategic and thoughtful pricing, strong marketing, and really managing expectations.”
Expectations, apparently, were managed. Not only did پ’s yield the highest totals of the week, but it also dominated the peak of the market, selling nine of the week’s top 10 lots. With the sale of Claude Monet’s Peupliers au bord de l’Epte, crépuscule, it set a new record for the artist’s Peupliers series; and with the $13.6-million sale of , it set the record for a living female artist at auction.
But Ms. Brennan isn’t taking a victory lap just yet. “As we look to build future sales for the balance of the year, I think we’re going to be really careful about the composition, the size of the sales and the number of lots at certain price points, to make sure that we are being good listeners,” she says. “There’s a fair amount of uncertainty in the world right now, and our market is one that thrives on stability.”
You can see last week’s top 10 lots, which totaled about $279 million, in the list. — Bloomberg
1. $15.2 million for Gerhard Richter’s Korsika (Schiff) from 1968. Sold at
(https://tinyurl.com/388pa5yx)
2. $15.9 million for René Magritte’s Les droits de l’homme from 1947-1948. Sold at
(https://tinyurl.com/23dddyua)
3. $16.3 million for Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Untitled from 1981. Sold at
(https://tinyurl.com/4fr8tnu3)
4. $17.6 million for Alberto Giacometti’s Femme de Venise I, cast in 1958. Sold at
(https://tinyurl.com/529u2zhv)
5. $23.4 million for Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Baby Boom from 1982. Sold at
(https://tinyurl.com/2h895u4s)
6. $28 million for Pablo Picasso’s Femme à la coiffe d’Arlésienne sur fond vert (Lee Miller) from 1937. Sold at
(https://tinyurl.com/nersy87x)
7. $34.9 million for René Magritte’s L’empire des lumières from 1949. Sold at
(https://tinyurl.com/3xwe4yfk)
8. $37.7 million for Mark Rothko’s No. 4 (Two Dominants) [Orange, Plum, Black] from 1950-1951. Sold at
(https://tinyurl.com/2rstpa23)
9. $42.9 million for Claude Monet’s Peupliers au bord de l’Epte, crépuscule from 1891. Sold at
(https://tinyurl.com/yc2fftj8)
10. $47.5 million for Piet Mondrian’s Composition with Large Red Plane, Bluish Gray, Yellow, Black and Blue from 1922. Sold at
(https://tinyurl.com/3ud77wey)
