JOIN USAre “Imps & Mods,” the ultimate trophy art of the 1980s, making a comeback? Over the past few days news has trickled out that a Qatari buyer may have paid as much as $300 million — a record sum for any artwork — for an 1892 Paul Gauguin canvas of two Tahitian women.
On Tuesday, February 3, meanwhile, Sotheby’s held a 75-lot evening auction of Imps and Mods — the trade name for Impressionist and modern works — that grossed £186.4 million with fees, or about $285 million. The total was the highest for any art auction ever held in London. The next evening, an equivalent £147 million sale at Christie’s included a Surrealist section that took in £66.7 million — a new high for the category.
These results were remarkable, given that Impressionist and modern works have fallen out of vogue with many of the world’s wealthiest collectors in recent years. In 2014, Christie’s worldwide sales of Impressionist and modern art totaled £732.5 million, less than half the £1.7 billion achieved at the company’s auctions of contemporary works. (Sotheby’s figures are not yet available.)
But as the prices of must-have artists such as Gerhard Richter, Christopher Wool, Wade Guyton — and of painters not yet out of their 20s — spiral giddily upward, and wider economic indicators become increasingly uncertain, the museum-proven greats of the late 19th and early 20th centuries are viewed by many as a safe bet.
“Contemporary is about playing the casino,” said the Paris dealer Christian Ogier, who attended the London sales. “Impressionist and modern art is about serious money looking for an investment. My clients are trying to find somewhere to park their money.”
The presence of expanded teams of more than 100 people staffing telephones at both Sotheby’s and Christie’s was an indication of the international demand for investment-grade Impressionist and modern art. Both sales found buyers for more than 85 per cent of their lots, with Christie’s saying they had bidders registered from 34 countries.
On this occasion, Sotheby’s offered the more commercial selection. The company, which has just increased its fees to buyers, spent about £60 million of its own money to secure 12 desirable works that carried presale guarantees in the catalogue. These included two of five Monet paintings, estimated in a range from £1.2 million to £30 million.
“Monet has become the trophy name of this market cycle,” said the London art adviser Wendy Goldsmith, a former head of 19th-century paintings at Christie’s. “He’s so coveted, like Renoir was in the 1980s. He’s become a currency.”
All five of Sotheby’s Monet paintings were successful, attracting competition from 14 different bidders. The 1908 ‘Le Grand Canal’, bought by its seller for $12.9 million at auction in 2005, topped the evening with a price of £23.7 million. The 1887 landscape ‘Les Peupliers à Giverny’, sold by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, went for £10.8 million. Those works were bought by telephone bidders just above their low estimates, having been guaranteed to fetch minimum prices by both Sotheby’s and external third parties.
In recent years, Russians have been active buyers at London auctions. But with the ruble slumping 46 per cent against the dollar in 2014, and a further 7 per cent this year, they were selling as well as buying this time around.
Dealers said a Russian woman living in London was the seller of a 1909-1910 Kazimir Malevich self-portrait on paper that was a part of last year’s Tate Modern retrospective on the artist. Bought at auction for £162,000 in 2004, it was offered at Sotheby’s with a low estimate of £1 million. It was eventually bought by the London dealer Harry Blain, on behalf of a client identified by several dealers as the Russian businessman Roman Abramovich, who lives in London. The price was £5.7 million with fees, after a lengthy struggle with the Cologne dealer Alex Lachman, who advises Petr Aven, the head of Russia’s largest private bank. Blain had not responded to a call seeking confirmation that Abramovich was the buyer.
Surrealist art too on upswing
Christie’s record-breaking Surrealist sale included the large 1950 Joan Miró canvas, ‘Painting (Woman, Moon, Birds)’, estimated at £4 million to £7 million. Filled with the playful biomorphic figures that are Miró’s hallmark, and notable for its bright decorative colors, the painting had never appeared at auction before and had been in the same European private collection since 1963.
It was bought by a telephone bidder for £15.5 million against determined competition in the room from the Nahmad family of dealers and Acquavella Galleries in New York.
The price for this instantly recognisable and showy Miró contrasted with the slightly less feverish £13.5 million, just above the high estimate, paid at Christie’s by the New York art adviser Nancy Whyte for Paul Cézanne’s historically important, but more cerebral circa 1883-1885 landscape ‘Vue sur l’Estaque et le Château d’If’ being sold by the family of the English collector Samuel Courtauld.