Records tumble as Frieze draws the world’s wealthiest collectors

Colin Gleadell reports on the astonishing rise of the contemporary art fair Frieze London

In 2003, the first Frieze Art Fair was staged in London in October, partly to coincide with the “mid-season” contemporary art auctions that would rustle up about £3 million if they were lucky. The fair’s organisers could hardly have imagined that the big, global auction rooms might one day alter their calendar schedule around Frieze. But it has since become such a magnet for the world’s wealthy, that Christie’s abandoned its high-summer season contemporary art sales this year to focus on putting a major sale together for Frieze week instead. The result was that by Saturday night, the Frieze week auctions had reached a record £292million.

Indeed, the record for any contemporary art series in Europe would have been beaten had Christie’s sold its star lot – a large pope painting by Francis Bacon valued at £60million. But potential buyers sat on their hands, as the saying goes, and did not bid, nervous of the fact that no single canvas by Bacon, as distinct from a triptych, had ever made that much money at auction before.

There were other flops during the week, temporarily deflating that feeling of wellbeing that the market thrives on. At Sotheby’s evening sale, one of the top lots by the ill-fated Jean-michel Basquiat didn’t sell, with a

£5 million estimate and guarantee direct from the auction house.

The next day, in an unusual move, it was back on the rostrum, after some negotiating with the seller, and sold for a little less, minimising the loss to Sotheby’s. Another guarantee it probably lost money on was a large digitally manipulated photo of Bahrain by Andreas Gursky, valued at £550,000, which it guaranteed but couldn’t sell.

At Phillips, there was dismay as two sculptures by world-famous dissenting Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, which had been bought in the past two years, sold for far less than they had cost. At Christie’s, Damien Hirst was the fall guy.

Otherwise, the market seemed in good shape – particularly for British artists. Grayson Perry, our favourite opinionated cross-dressing potter, saw one record tumble after another – first at the Christie’s evening sale, when a 2003 pot with an unquotable title doubled estimates to sell to international dealer Micky Tiroche for £200,000, and then, more dramatically, the next day when his 1996 glazed ceramic vase, I Want to Be an Artist (below), which features images of Basquiat and Andy Warhol, sold for a 10-times estimate of £632,750.

The same vase had been profitably sold by Charles Saatchi in 2004, just after Perry won the Turner Prize, for what then seemed a very high £36,000. “The impact of his show at the Serpentine Gallery, which

‘Grayson Perry’s 1996 ceramic vase, ‘I Want to Be an Artist’, sold for a 10-times estimate of £632,750’

was the best attended exhibition in the history of the gallery, cannot be underestimated,” explained Glenn Scott-wright of Perry’s gallery, Victoria Miro.

One of this year’s Turner Prize contestants, Hurvin Anderson, has also been a focus of Saatchi’s collector/ dealer instinct and is currently red hot. Normally scarce on the auction market, four works by him, a figurative painter in the mould of Peter Doig, were at auction last week, all far surpassing estimates.

A shimmering beach scene that Saatchi bought in 2009 for a record £97,250 and sold four years later for a record £302,500 appeared at Sotheby’s and sold for an even bigger profit, though not a record this time, at £890,750. That privilege fell to the next Anderson on the block, a back view of a seated figure in a hot blue interior, which sold at Phillips to a Chinese bidder for £1.8million.

But within hours, Christie’s had trumped that with Anderson’s larger 2008 canvas, Country Club Chicken Wire. The warm-coloured painting shows a tennis court in a private Jamaican club segregated from outsiders by a chicken-wire fence, confronting the viewer with a sense of alienation. Originally priced at around £25,000, it sold for £2.6million. The buyer appeared to be shipping heir Nicholas Goulandris, sitting next to the artist’s New York dealer, who did the bidding.

Another former Turner Prize winner, the late Howard Hodgkin, was also in the records when a vibrant small painting sold for £1.7million, as was Antony Gormley, whose 28ft-wide iron sculpture based on the famous Angel of the North in Gateshead sold for £5.3million. The buyer was Japanese collector Yusaku Maezawa, who recently spent $110million (£83.7million) on a painting by Basquiat.

Whether Christie’s decision to relinquish the summer sale will be copied is uncertain. This week, it won the battle comfortably with £177.2million of sales against Sotheby’s £86.5million. But in the summer, Sotheby’s notched up £82.6million for contemporary art against nought for Christie’s. In the end, there was not much in it… but there might have been.