Surrealism’s silver lining
London’s Impressionist and Modern sales could be heading for a new high later this month, reports Colin Gleadell
Although auction sales took a dive last year (see market news) pre-sale estimates suggest that a new high is on the cards for London’s Impressionist and Modern art sales later this month. The last peak was in February 2014, when these sales realised £414 million, including the buyer’s premium. Estimates for this month’s sales, which do not include that premium, are £300 million to £410 million. A total somewhere in the middle of that would achieve it when the premium is added.
It is Sotheby’s that is setting the pace, with its highest ever pre-sale estimate in this series of £175 million to £232 million. Its stand-out lot is a gorgeous painting of a bank of flowers (seen at the Royal Academy’s Painting the Modern Garden show last year) by Vienna Secessionist artist Gustav Klimt, estimated at around £35 million. The sale was announced last week just one day after news broke that media mogul Oprah Winfrey had sold a Klimt portrait that she bought at auction in 2006 for $87.9 million, for $150 million (£120 million) to a Chinese collector. Klimt’s landscapes are not in the same price bracket as his exotic figure paintings, but the Sotheby’s example could make a record for one.
Sotheby’s is also pitching for record prices with Camille Pissarro’s The Four Seasons, an Alfred Sisley snow scene, a grizzly double portrait by the Expressionist Oskar Kokoschka, and for an early Impressionist painting by the Dadaist Francis Picabia, currently the subject of an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Christie’s Impressionist sale is a minnow by comparison, estimated at half the amount. Led by a small Gauguin Tahitian landscape at £12 million, it covers the same territory, but at lower prices. Where Christie’s is ahead, however, is in the specialised Surrealist sales. With a sale that could make as much as £45.5 million, compared with Sotheby’s highest hopes of £26 million, Christie’s is placing its biggest bets on Magritte. La Corde Sensible, a huge, cloudtopped champagne glass above a mountain range, is set to break the artist’s record with a £14 million estimate and a financial guarantee that ensures it will. Previously at auction twice in the Eighties, it fetched a record £350,000 in 1984.
The other major Magritte is a view of an eagle-shaped mountain that made the second highest price for the artist in 1988 when it was sold from the Edward James Foundation for $825,000. Its new price is estimated at £6.5 million.
According to the late Robin Duthy’s Art Market Research Index, now managed by his son, Sebastian, the Surrealist market witnessed a boom between 2006 and 2013, when prices were increasing by an average 20 per cent a year. Christie’s annual Surrealist sales in that period jumped from £10 million to £37 million, and in 2015 leapt to £66.6 million. At that sale it was noticeable how many Asian bidders were coming into the market.
But Surrealism is not where the main contest is. Sotheby’s is anxious to prove that it still has the upper edge in the Impressionist and Modern art market, notwithstanding the departure of their leading business getters, Melanie Clore and David Norman, a year ago. Whereas nothing in Christie’s Impressionist and Modern Art catalogue has been guaranteed, eight of Sotheby’s top lots are guaranteed either by the auction house or a third party who has promised to make what is called an “irrevocable bid”.
These are now familiar ways of persuading owners – of the Klimt, in which Sotheby’s has a financial interest as well as an irrevocable bid; of a £10 million Picasso painting of a tomato plant; or of the record-breaking £6million Sisley snow scene – to sell.
A pastel of a naked woman’s back by Degas is also guaranteed by Sotheby’s at £6 million and is a telling reminder of today’s context. Coming from the collection of former chairman Alfred Taubman, it had been offered in the famous Taubman sale in November 2015 that carried an extraordinary $500 million guarantee. The failure of Sotheby’s to reach that target led to the extreme belt-tightening and wave of redundancies and departures a year ago.
One of the unsold lots was this Degas, carrying a $15-20 million estimate. It’s now back at half that.
This may be a record-breaking series, but for Sotheby’s it’s driven by the need to restate its position as market leaders by claiming majority market share by whatever means in its power.