Robert Frank’s Take on the Art Market

In case you don’t scour the web and newspapers looking for news of the art market, I thought I’d point you in the direction of a post by Robert Frank in his The Wealth Report blog for the Wall Street Journal.  It’s from the beginning of this month, right after the Sotheby’s and Christie’s Spring Impressionist and Modern sales.  Frank does a great job of sifting through the flattering hype spewed by market insiders to say that the sales really weren’t all that great.  Masterpieces didn’t even reach their highest estimate.  The sales were a let down compared to those of the past few years.

However, I will take one issue with Frank’s post: the final sales figure for Christie’s, while much lower than the Spring sale last year and the Yves Saint Laurent sale in February, were still comfortably within the overall estimates for the auction.  While this isn’t the amazing, over-the-top figures we’ve seen the last few years in the art market, it does show that there are buyers out there who are steadily willing to pay good money for good works of art.  The art market seems to have nicely self-corrected from its excesses and is still in good form.  Market correction is needed for further growth, afterall.

Christie’s Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale – London

The entire Impressionist and Modern evening sale was supposed to bring in more than £90m for Christie’s. The works being sold from the Miller collection were supposed to bring in more than £40m. Well, the Monet water lilies from the Miller collection alone managed to do that. Going for £40.9m ($80.5m), Le bassin aux nymphéas, 1919, well exceeded it’s £18m – £24m estimate and set an artist record for Monet. It is now the second most expensive painting sold at a European auction. Tania Buckwell Pos, director of AMI arts consultancy, bought the painting from the front row of the saleroom while on the phone with a client. She declined to give her client’s name or nationality.

I think the demand for this work of art has proved that the Impressionist market is far from dead. For great works, collectors will be willing to part with large sums of money.

To get the Monet, Ms. Buckwell Pos outbid Brett Gorby, a specialist in contemporary art at Christie’s New York, who was also on the phone. However, Mr. Gorby was the successful bidder for Degas’ Danseuses à la barre, which sold at £13.5m ($26.5m), more than doubling its high estimate of £6m.

The early fauvist portrait by Matisse, La Pudeur (L’italienne), 1906, failed to reach its estimate of £3m – £4m, selling for only £2.5m ($4.9m). Still, the sale did incredibly well overall, achieving £144.4m ($284.5m) for Christie’s, the highest ever for a European auction.