Chitralekha Basu
The Le Corbusiers, Renoirs and Picassos are on their way back to London, having touched down on Beijing, Shanghai, Taipei and Hong Kong on the way. Bringing the highlights of a major art auction to be held in New York or London over to China for a preview is not new. However, the volume and value of this east-bound traffic keeps getting better by the year. Many of these touring artworks are blue-chip, museum-worthy pieces — representative, epoch-defining creations by the giants of Western art. The previews present a rare opportunity to see a Marc Chagall or a Rene Magritte held in private hands in person. And while not every viewing will translate into a headline-making sale ( see sidebar), auction houses are pulling out all the stops to woo prospective buyers from the region, many of whom, now having collected the big names in Chinese contemporary art, are looking westward.
As the world’s leading auctioneers lay out their offerings for the evening sales of impressionist and modern art in London — Christie’s on Feb 28, Sotheby’s on March 1 — the Chinese collector is no longer just a peripheral presence on this scene. “Buyers from the region represent a very, very large proportion of the activity that we see in auctions in both New York and London,” says Simon Stock, senior director of Impressionist and Modern Art at Sotheby’s. “Travelling these works of art out to Asia isn’t inexpensive, so we won’t do it if there wasn’t a good business case for it.”
There is reason to believe the new emerging set of buyers who have begun warming up to the Western canon would evolve into influential collectors eventually, he suggests. “Collectors from both Hong Kong and the Chinese mainland are not necessarily buying at the highest level. But even to have the liquidity to buy something worth $300,000 to $600,000 is quite extraordinary and shows that there is massive potential there.”
It is these big-time collectors of the future that Christie’s is interested in cultivating as well. “We have been bringing more art meant for our London and New York sales to Asia than ever before,” says Elaine Holt, senior vice-president of Impressionist and Modern Art at Christie’s. “Prospective collectors often come to have a look and process the information. These could be our future buyers,” she adds, brightly.
Such optimism is an acknowledgement of both the economic might and growing awareness of Western art, especially its classic genres, in the region. After all quite a few iconic paintings by the 19th and 20th century masters of European art have found a home in this part of the world. A Hong Kong-based collector of Claude Monet’s work had lent his trophy possession to a major exhibition of the artist’s works at the Hong Kong Heritage Museum last year. “A Cezanne landscape was bought by a buyer from Asia recently who picked up the piece from a London sale but had seen it here in Christie’s Hong Kong gallery,” informs Holt. “Also a very high-value Picasso was bought by a buyer from Asia. All of these hap- pened in the last three years.”
“We sold a Camille Pissarro work on paper to someone from Asia in our last June auction in London. That was a direct result of our viewing in Hong Kong,” says Stock of Sotheby’s. “That’s just one example of many,” he says, adding, “I think Dali is a superstar in Asia.”
At their auction debut in Hong Kong in November 2016, Phillips sold Gerhard Richter’s Abstraktes Bild 776-1 for HK$19,880,000, “the highest price achieved for the artist at an auction in Hong Kong,” according to Phillips’ deputy chairman in Asia, Jonathan Crockett. “Roy Lichtenstein’s Landscape with Grass sold for HK$35,480,000, exceeding the high estimate,” he adds.
The Gen-Y collectors
More high-value artworks by the masters of Western art are getting sold in Hong Kong on the quiet, without the high drama and public spectacle seen at auctions. International- ly-active dealers of some of the finest art from Europe and the Americas — including blue-chip material — seem to have found a steady clientele in the tax haven of Hong Kong.
Mathieu Ticolat of Ticolat Tamura Ltd, who sold a figurative work by Picasso to a buyer from the Chinese mainland last year, says the deal would have made headlines if the piece were sold at an auction, “but art dealers like us as well as our buyers like to keep things quieter. We also charge much less commission than the auction houses do”.
Ticolat, who has also sold works by Monet and Pissarro in the recent past, says there is a lot of interest in acquiring pieces by Jean-Michael Basquiat, Jean Dubuffet and Alberto Giacometti.
The collector demographic, he notes, is getting progressively younger, with buyers in their twenties and thirties having grown by about 20 percent in the last five years. “The really affluent among them want only the very best. And they would go for the big names if money weren’t an issue.”
T he difference be tween their predecessors and the Gen-Y collectors, says Ticolat, is that “the newer and younger buyers are savvy, wellinformed and ask a lot of questions”.
“Also compared to the heavyweight buyers who came before them they prefer to be more discreet, preferring not to show off their wealth, although the reason for their wanting to collect Western art might be similar to that of their predecessors: they have money, they have education and now they want to possess the things that signify good taste. Besides they see spending on blue-chip Western art as a sound investment,” he adds.
The lure of big names
One of the reasons for wanting to possess a signature artwork by a wellknown artist is often the story of its provenance and being able to relive that moment in history by associa- tion. As Holt of Christie’s points out, the paintings by Le Corbusier and Paul Cezanne up for sale at the Feb 28 auction in London “are pathbreaking works, signifying the beginning of art movements”. The new, informed generation of collectors is giving in to the enduring charm of such histories which are significantly better documented in the Western tradition.
The other less-romantic reason for gravitating from the A list of Chinese contemporary art towards the Western masters could be that the former category is past its boom time and there aren’t that many of these circulating in the market any more.
Most of the collectors now buying Western art “have been very active in the Chinese contemporary art market,” remarks Pascal de Sarthe, founder of De Sarthe Gallery, and also high-profile art dealer with bases in Beijing and Hong Kong. He refers to a time in the immediate past when the prices of contemporary Chinese art went through the roof, fuelled by rampant speculation that did not always take the artistic merit of the piece into consideration.
“Now that collectors have realized that those pricings were driven largely by speculation they have started looking at markets that are more stable, like that of impressionist art and 20th century modern European,” says de Sarthe. “Collectors also travel a lot. They see exhibitions in The Centre Pompidou in Paris and want to buy a Constantin Brancusi sculpture or visit The Tate in London and want a painting by David Hockney.” Their acquisitive impulse, says de Sarthe, is still triggered by what is trending, “the difference being that they want to go for the hugely established and historically important names”.
After all, how wrong can you get with a Picasso?
De Sarthe, however, cautions against giving into the lure of the biggest and the buzziest. “For $2 million you can buy a small painting by Warhol or Picasso. You can buy the name, but you may not necessarily get the best piece by the said artist.”