London’s contemporary art sales in two weeks’ time are expected to make at least £320 million, beating the record £295.5 million set in February 2014. While Christie’s has been the market leader in New York, its pre-London sale estimates trail Sotheby’s by £95 million to £156 million. Clearly it cares more about winning in New York than in London.
Five of the eight highest-valued lots of the week are by Francis Bacon. Of variable quality, none has a financial guarantee to sell, so it will be a stern test of his market. Christie’s has the least valuable examples, with a small diptych of portraits of Isabel Rawsthorne and George Dyer that was shown in Basel last year and has an £8 million estimate, and a less typical painting of agricultural labourers that was rescued at auction eight years ago by an Asian bidder, who paid £5 million for it. Christie’s is now hoping for £7 million.
Christie’s guarantees are noticeably lower than they were in New York, but still account for about 30 per cent of the sale’s total value. Among the works guaranteed to sell are Chris Ofili’s
The Holy Virgin Mary, which so upset Rudolph Giuliani, the then mayor of New York, when it travelled there as part of Charles Saatchi’s Sensation exhibition.
The painting, estimated at £1.4 million, is being sold by Australian collector David Walsh, who is also selling Jake and Dinos Chapman’s gruesome
Great Deeds Against the Dead, which will set an auction record if it makes its £400,000 estimate. The sculpture was the subject of a police interrogation when first exhibited in 1994, until the brothers explained it was based on a painting by Goya.
Walsh, a professional gambler, does not expect to make a profit on these works, as he paid top dollar to Saatchi for them, but is using the money to build a gallery for his quieter, more contemplative light installations by James Turrell.
Saatchi, meanwhile, continues to trade in works by younger artists, and hopes to sell a photographic installation by the currently sought-after RH Quaytman for a recordbreaking £300,000.
Dutifully propping up the sale is Christie’s owner, François Pinault, who has sent about a dozen works for auction by Elmgreen and Dragsett, Anselm Reyle and others, including an eye-catching, taxidermy ostrich with its head buried in the floor by Maurizio Cattelan, which is estimated at £1.5 million.
Sotheby’s more valuable sale has remarkably few guarantees, so results could be less predictable. A triptych of small self-portraits and a single small self-portrait by Bacon have not been seen since they were bought more than 35 years ago by the reclusive Belgian collector Jacques Casier. The single portrait is of superior quality, but both are estimated at £10 million. Will both sell?
The top lot of the week, though, is Bacon’s larger Study for a Pope I, which was once owned by German playboy Gunther Sachs, who sold it for a record £5.8 million 10 years ago. The buyer recently sold it on to, it is believed, a member of the Cingillioglu family of Turkish bankers and art collectors. Even if not the best of the Pope paintings, its estimate of £25 million reflects the rise in value of Bacon’s art in the past 10 years.
Sotheby’s other big moneyspinner is a collection of 21 paintings of the American dollar, which are priced on average at $3 million each. The only hand-painted picture of a dollar bill by Andy Warhol could fetch £13 million.
While Christie’s has a focus on young British artists, Sotheby’s has the best of the older School of London artists. Apart from the Bacons, there are Auerbach and Freud drawings from the estate of the poet, Stephen Spender, a little painting of eggs by Freud from the late Duchess of Devonshire, and a group of superb, potentially record-breaking paintings by Howard Hodgkin and Paula Rego from an anonymous American collection.
After Phillips sold a set of goldplated zodiac figures by Ai Wei Wei for a record £2.9 million to Facebook founding president Sean Parker in February, it is leading its June sale with a bronze set estimated to top that, at £3 million.
Among several guarantees is a painting by Chris Ofili that was sold in 1998 for £19,550 to Greek collector Dimitri Daskalopoulos and is now estimated at £300,000. Its value has therefore been increasing by an average 92 per cent a year. But contemporary art can lose value, too. A salutary reminder is a painting by Franz Ackermann, bought in 2006 for £153,000, and back now with a £20,000 estimate.