ASTUTE INVESTMENT IN ARTISTIC INSPIRATION
Demand for a particular artist’s work correlates with its value
The more people willing to buy a piece of art, the more convincing the argument that the work is here to stay. When that artist’s pieces begin to find a new life in the secondary market, the more you can be sure that his or her work is a good investment.
After taking stock of last month’s contemporary auctions, anyone could look to the market of London-born Lynette Yiadom-Boakye and reasonably conclude that her work has crossed over, in market terms, from “up and coming” to something more significant.
Over two days, three of the painter’s lush oil paintings depicting fictional black characters came to auction at Sotheby’s. One, The Hours Behind You (2011), which is more than 8 feet wide and depicts a group of dancers dressed in white, was estimated to sell for US$250,000 to $350,000 (Dh918,043 to Dh1.2 million). It sold for $1.57m, according to Bloomberg.
The next day, two more came on the block at Sotheby’s. The first, estimated at $80,000 to $120,000, sold for just under $340,000, while the second, estimated between $100,000 and $150,000, sold for $118,750.
“Only five or six years ago you could still buy one of these canvases for less than £10,000 [Dh49,293],” says Hannah O’Leary, the head of Sotheby’s modern and contemporary African art department, a division that was created last year. “Certainly, in the last 12 to 24 months, we’ve had a surge of people desperate to acquire her pieces.”
Call it a market trend or call it simply a long-overdue recognition of overlooked artists, but Yiadom-Boakye, who was born in 1977, joins a select group of peers from the African diaspora, including Njideka Akunyili Crosby and Kerry James Marshall, whose paintings have surged past $1m at auction.
“She’s a great artist, first of all,” says Ms O’Leary. “But the fact that she is a woman, she is black, she is of the African diaspora – these are all things that the [art] market is turning toward.”
It’s not as if Yiadom-Boakye is unknown to many in the art world since she graduated from the Royal Academy in London’s MFA programme in 2003.
While her style has evolved over the past 10 years, YiadomBoakye paints oil portraits of people from her imagination. Drawing on established stylistic precedents – Manet and Goya are often evoked – she developed a distinct aesthetic with deep, saturated colours and dynamic figures.
“She’s an extraordinary painter,” says Tamsen Greene, a senior director at New York’s Jack Shainman gallery, which has represented YiadomBoakye since 2009. “She’s made her own, unique style, but she uses this classic, incredibly formal visual language that draws people in.
“Since the day we’ve started working with her, there’s been a great deal of demand. “We’ve always had to manage a wait list.”
For all that, it took nearly a decade for a single painting by Yiadom-Boakye to come up to auction, when her 2005 work Politics was put on sale at Sotheby’s in London in 2010 with an estimate of £15,000 to £20,000. It sold for £52,500 with premium.
The next day at Christie’s London, another one of her paintings sold for £146,000 above a high estimate of £50,000, and the day after that, also at Christie’s London, another painting sold for £116,553 over a high estimate of £15,000.
“We, along with her London gallery, do everything we can to place her work in collections that are going to be good stewards,” says Ms Greene.
Ms O’Leary credits YiadomBoakye’s secondary market breakthrough to the New Museum show this year. “She was really in the London auctions,” she says. “But we can attribute a lot of her success to her newly raised profile in the US.”
The inevitable question – whether her status in the art market can be sustained – has already been answered, Ms Greene says. “She’s not a new artist. She’s had important solo shows and I don’t see why that would change,” she says.
Still, Yiadom-Boakye has some way to go before her personal effects alone can command more than $10m.
A collection of the French artist Claude Monet’s personal belongings, including a pair of round-rimmed wire spectacles, fetched almost $11m at an auction in Hong Kong, Christie’s said last month.
The glasses, made from gold-coloured metal, went to an unnamed Asian buyer for $51,457, far exceeding the auction house’s estimate of $1,000 to $1,500, according to Reuters.
The sale included other rare items like Monet’s pencil sketches, paintings and Japanese woodblock prints from the French master’s personal collection. One of Monet’s pencil sketches of sailboats on paper when he was a teenager was sold for a relatively modest $136,685 in Hong Kong.
“This collection provides an intimate insight into the life of Monet the artist and Monet the collector,” said Adrien Meyer, the co-chairman of the Impressionist and Modern art department at Christie’s.
She is a woman, she is black, she is of the African diaspora – these are all things that the market is turning toward HANNAH O’LEARY Sotheby’s African art