MARKET NEWS
Christie’s released its sales figures last week and, as anticipated, auction sales were down from the previous year – from £4.3 billion in 2015 to £3.3 billion; that represents a fall of 23 per cent in sterling, or 32 per cent in dollars. The worst hit departments were the “high flyers” – contemporary art was down 41 per cent and Impressionist and Modern art were down 50 per cent. Rewarding, then, for traditionalists to see that the Old Master department was the most improved sector, up by 31 per cent with the help of that £45 million Rubens that sold in London last July. Although Sotheby’s does not report private sales until later this month, its auction sales of $4.1 billion (£3.28 billion) are the closest to Christie’s for a long time.
A debate on whether to impose a total ban on ivory trading, including antiques, took place at Westminster last week, but it turned into a pointless threehour reiteration of how everyone is appalled by elephant slaughter. Why debate something that everyone is agreed upon? It seems that the protectionists have trained MPs so well to recite the number of deaths suffered or how their legacy to their grandchildren might be viewed that they have lost sight, with a few exceptions, of the real issue. Could anyone say how a ban on the antiques trade will save elephant lives, asked Rob Marris, the MP for Wolverhampton despairingly, more than once. He was met with no satisfactory response.
Three years ago, Sotheby’s staged a sell-out auction of the £75 million collection of the late art dealer Jan Krugier. A few smaller items escaped the net and are coming up next month at Dreweatts Newbury saleroom. The sale includes work by the modern artists Zoran Music, Maurice Denis and Max Ernst as well as tribal art. Prices range from £100 to £10,000.
David Hockney’s London dealer, the Annely Juda gallery, is treating fans with its second exhibition of comparatively affordable works by the master – prints of his colourful iPad drawings of the Yosemite National Park in the US or his beloved Woldgate Woods in Yorkshire. They are priced from $20,000 (£16,000) to $28,000 each, and all are printed in limited editions of eight.
There was much excitement at Sotheby’s in London during the installation last week of its first ever sale of erotic art, Erotic: Passion and Desire. Oh, to have been a fly on the wall when they were planning dates. If Valentine’s Day came into the reckoning, and who can doubt that it did, what kind of proposals did they envisage might result today during the viewing? Nothing of a platonic nature, by the look of the catalogue. Perhaps there is no distinction between sex and love in the eyes of the auctioneers. Certainly the standard, market-friendly faces of some of the specialists photographed inside the catalogue – smiling coquettishly, glancing sideways suggestively, or with full frontal glee – take on a hilariously mischievous aspect in the context of this sale. Wielding the hammer on Thursday will be the innocentenough looking Georgina Gold, who has already demonstrated admirable aplomb on the rostrum during Sotheby’s Impressionist sales.