…Auction madness continues unabated in London…Warhol would’ve loved this!

Image: usatoday.com

Notes from a story in the Observer, published Sunday February 11, 2007
By Carole Cadwalldr

Please note, the images in this article are not necessarily the exact works referred to.

First, some facts. Every February Sotheby’s, Christie’s and, to a
lesser extent, Phillips, hold art sales. New York is the centre of
the art world and traditionally the London sales are where the houses
sell fewer works of inferior quality to smaller numbers of people.
But no more. This week they broke all records, selling more paintings
at higher prices to more people than ever before.


Image: vgallery.co.za

It made headlines all week long. A portrait of Pope Innocent X by
Francis Bacon sold for 14million Pounds- almost double the price of any
previous Bacon painting sold at auction. A landscape by Peter Doig
inspired by the film Friday the 13th went for 5.7million Pounds, making it
the most expensive work ever sold by a European living artist and
very nearly the most expensive by any living artist.

Note to readers:
Compare this with what I wrote in an article four years ago in 2003, from a Sotheby’s London auction:

Much was obviously expected of young hot shots Jenny Saville (who had the catalogue cover) and Peter Doig. Saville’s Untitled from 1990 was painted when the artist was only twenty, and was described in the catalogue entry as being ‘one of the most powerful and confrontational paintings’ in her oeuvre. An impressive work, but it failed to make its low estimate of 300,000 Pounds and was bought in at 280,000. Doig fared slightly better, perhaps thanks to the rather more conservative estimate (120,000 – 150,000) which it surpassed to reach 200,000 Pounds, a decent price for Grasshopper from 1990, a rich, early example of his work.

Francis Bacon, Study after Velazquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X, 1953. Image: ibiblio.org

A photographic diptych of an American supermarket by Andreas Gursky became, at 1.7million Pounds,
the world’s most expensive photograph. Forty-three
artists sold at higher prices than they’d ever sold before. In all,
more than 360 million Pounds was spent on art in a single week.

Again, from my 2003 article:

Perhaps the sale organisers were hoping to capitalise on the popularity of Cruel and Tender, Tate Modern’s then-current exhibition, by offering featured German photographers Thomas Demand and Andreas Gursky as openers. Demand’s Fenster (Window) of 1998, number three in an edition of six, fetched 44,000 against its estimate of 40-60,000 Pounds. Gursky fared less well as his lofty image of perfectly groomed earth, number one in an edition of six, was bought in at 42,000 Pounds.

Andreas Gursky, 99 Cent 1999. Image: asuartmuseum.asu.edu

Lot 3, a sculpture by Wilhelm
Lehmbruck, starts at 150,000, sails past the lower estimate of
250,000, past the higher estimate of 350,000 and then
keeps on going: 400,000, 420,000, 500,000,
600,000… When it reaches a million, I actually gasp. This is
so not cool. As the week progresses, I see lot after lot go for
twice, three times, four times the estimate.

Wilhelm Lehmbruck, zittende jongeling, 1916-17. Image: kunsttrip.nl

But I’d met the owner of
the Lehmbruck (and can’t help myself) - a nervous Canadian lecturer
whose family had owned it in the Thirties. They had a Mies van der
Rohe house in the Sudetenland until the Gestapo came and occupied it
and the sculpture simply vanished. No one knew where it was until
last year when someone happened to notice that it was on display in
the Moravian Museum in Brno - and they restituted it through the courts.

There’s more overexcitement at the press conference afterwards.
They’ve smashed record after record and taken huge, unparalleled
amounts of money. And it’s then that I start having my Eighties
flashbacks, although this process is aided by the fact that I chat to
Helena Newman, a senior director at Sotheby’s, who has them for me.
The evening, she says, had surpassed anything she saw back then.

‘I joined the department in 1989 when it was the absolute peak. It
was incredible, and then about nine months later it started to go
down - it was something to do with Japanese interest rates - and from
May to June, the market tumbled.

‘This is a peak beyond anything we’ve ever seen before. There isn’t
any sense that it’s slowing down. There’s an enormous amount of
wealth around at the moment - we have Russians, South-East Asians,
Middle Easterners buying here. The strong pound means Americans want
to sell here. And it’s a self-perpetuating process. There were very
strong prices in November, and that brings the quality buyers out,
which brings out the sellers.’

Tim Noble and Sue Webster’s lightbulb sculpture. Image: ps1.org

Two nights later Cheyenne Westphal, the head of Sotheby’s
contemporary department, puts it even more plainly: ‘People are not
just making money these days. They’re making fortunes - of a type
that the world simply hasn’t seen before. There’s just more money
around than there used to be.’

But still, you do have to wonder what’s going on when you watch a
Peter Doig painting sell for 5.7million Pounds…When the bidding reaches 3 million Pounds, Ivor Braka, a collector and dealer shakes
his head. ‘That,’ he says, ‘just makes a mockery of everything.
What’s a Turner worth then?’ When it reaches 4m, he says, ‘I’m
not denigrating Peter Doig as an artist, far from it… but I mean,
if you get 4m for a Doig…?’ He doesn’t finish the sentence
though, because the bidding goes up and up and up.

Peter Doig, Canoe-Lake, 1997-8. Image: saatchi-gallery.co.uk

William Cash, the editor of Spear’s Wealth
Management Survey (says): ‘It’s clearly a bubble. Look! All the dealers are
leaving. It’s what’s called a “shut-out” in the trade. It’s identical
to the Eighties except there’s a new generation of suckers. And the
new generation of suckers are the Russians. They’re interior
decorators. Not collectors.