Why this stylish portrait proved irresistible to online bidders
Among all the devastation wreaked by coronavirus in the physical world, activity online – where sales focus on the lower and mid levels of the market (£1,000 up to, very rarely, £1million) – is offering glimmers of hope. My list of highlights of the past month starts with a sale of modern Middle Eastern art at Sotheby’s on March 24, which took place just hours after the lockdown, and switched from live to online-only at the last moment. Bidding was active, with the King of Morocco, market sources suggest, buying two of the top lots. The king supports the Mohamed VI Museum of Modern and Contemporary art in Rabat, which he opened in 2014, and the two paintings were by Moroccan artists.
One was an early 1963, New York period hard-edged abstract painting by Mohamed Melehi, who had a show at London’s Mosaic Rooms last summer. Entitled The Blacks, it sold for £399,000 against a £55,000 estimate. But, if we are playing a game of Art Market Picture of the Month, it doesn’t get my vote, as I think Melehi’s later, more fluid work, after he returned to Morocco, is his most mature.
Staying with Sotheby’s and the Middle East, an online Orientalist sale that closed on April 7 included a surprise – a rare 19th-century painting inside a Turkish harem by a female artist, Henriette Browne, which was estimated at £50,000.
Nothing by Browne had made more than £70,000 before, and this painting had sold in 2005 for £31,000 in a European art sale. However, its rarity and placement in a specialised Orientalist sale helped to attract more than 40 bids to hit a record £795,000 for the artist. This, though, is not my picture of the month either, because the quality does not match its rarity.
How about Sotheby’s sale of a painting by George Condo for £1.1million, a record for an artwork in an online-only auction? Part of a wider sale of Contemporary Art, which grossed an astonishing £5.1million, it took Sotheby’s overall online-only sales this year to an impressive $65million (£52million). But the Condo does not get my vote either because, in my opinion, it is average
Condo, and I am beginning to prefer his drawings.
Christie’s is very much playing catch-up in the battle for internet supremacy, but it has 21 online sales scheduled from today until the end of May across various categories, worth an estimated $20million. Highlights include a collection of landscape photographs by Andy Warhol released by the Warhol Foundation to raise money for artists in need during the Covid-19 crisis (most estimates from $2,000 to $5,000), and the latest round of works by young artists from the Saatchi collection ranging from £2,000 to £15,000.
But unpopulated Warhol landscape photographs, while unusual, could be by anyone. Nor does the Saatchi provenance carry the allure it once had. So, neither of these two sales particularly whet my appetite.
Instead, my winner of Art Market Picture of the Month is taken from a Sotheby’s sale of Old Masters collected by London dealer Rafael Valls. Online is not an area where Old Masters have tended to thrive, but nearly everything in the collection sold, making a triple-estimate £1.6million.
One wonderfully stylish and playful 17th-century portrait was of a man drawing back the curtain on a picture of his betrothed by an unknown Flemish or Italian artist which Valls had bought at Sotheby’s New York in 2013 for $56,000.
It was then in a rather grubby condition. But, even though it was still vaguely attributed, because it had cleaned up beautifully and was re-presented with a tempting £8,000 estimate, it attracted more than 50 bids before selling for £275,000 ($340,000) – a result founded on a combination of aesthetic appeal and tactical pricing to which online bidders responded.
I have stuck here to the two leading auctioneers, but, in fact, there have been countless initiatives by provincial auctioneers, dealers’ exhibitions and art fairs, like the London Original Print Fair, which goes online this week. This column is going on hiatus for the rest of the spring and summer, but if you want to play Art Market Picture of the Month yourself, send images and reasons for your vote to my Twitter account: @colingleadell.