Paris Is for Buyers

PARIS—In the auction world, as in judo, strength is not necessarily an advantage. The French auctioneering profession, which has been plagued by fragmentation for as long as memory can stretch back, proves the point.

No fewer than 69 sociétés de ventes (auctioneering groups) vie with one another in Paris alone. The sales generated in 2006 by the most powerful group, Artcurial, added up to €100.5 million ($145.2 million)—quite a modest sum compared with the €172.2 million ($290 million) and €55 million ($79.5 million) earned, respectively, by Christie’s and Sotheby’s in the French capital and minuscule against their worldwide totals of $4.7 billion and $3.8 billion.

The French houses’ budgets for promoting sales are small, and few have truly international networks of contacts like those of Christie’s and Sotheby’s. Some, such as Artcurial and Tajan, have their own auction premises, but the smaller groups operate out of Drouot, the Left Bank venue where all auctioneers licensed within the Paris district were bound to hold their sales until the 2001 reforms. Total sales at the Hotel Drouot, as it was called for decades and still is by old-timers, rose to $500 million. At the height of the season, several sales conducted by various houses thus take place simultaneously every day of the week. Some goods offered are of flea market quality, while others rise to higher standards. Needless to say, French auctioneers have a low profile on the international scene.

A recipe for stagnation? Possibly, but to traditional art hunters, this makes Drouot the nearest approximation to paradise on earth. To anyone in search of objects that are really fresh to the market and yet not hyped to death, Drouot is the place.

And that’s not all. Because there are so many Paris auctioneers, consignors cannot play them off against one another to the same extent as they do Christie’s and Sotheby’s, where the competition has resulted in ever-rising estimates and reserves.

In a number of categories, Drouot is the only hunting ground where all hope of making a brilliant buy at auction is not lost. The art of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and the early Baroque is one such area. Works from these periods were produced and accumulated in France over the centuries, making the country a large repository of this art. When the 1789 revolution broke up countless church treasures and looted hundreds of aristocratic châteaus, tens of thousands of objects were released onto the market and pounced upon by avid collectors. Under Napole­on I, Louis Philippe (1830–1848) and Napoleon III (1852–1870), the destruction of churches that was begun during the revolution intensified as a result of urban development, leading to hosts of sculptures being put up for sale. These became much sought after when Gothic and Romanesque art was rediscovered in the Romantic age. All true collectors are cagey, the French possibly more so than others, which is why objects of which no one had ever heard keep surfacing at Drouot.

When holding speciality sales, French groups have the option of calling in consultants whom they deem to have expertise in a given subject. These experts describe the objects, vouch for their authenticity and sit at a table by the auctioneer’s podium during the sale, calling out each lot as it comes on the block. Laurence Fligny is virtually alone among Drouot specialists in combining firsthand knowledge of her field with an academic interest in the subject. Having started out in the late 1970s as a young dealer in Haute époque (the Middle Ages to the 16th century) furniture of central France, she moved to the capital, where she spent several years writing the first book ever on medieval, Renaissance and Baroque furniture from Picardy, a province north of Paris. Published in 1990, Cinq cents ans de mobilier en Picardie remains the one reference book on the topic. Her background gives Fligny a good deal of sympathy with the collectors’ approach to art and leaves a distinctive imprint on the Drouot sales in which she is involved.

One such sale occurred on October 17. In it, Piasa—fourth among French auctioneering groups in financial importance last year, after Artcurial, Encheres-Rive Gauche and Tajan— offered works of medieval, Renaissance and Baroque art. A number of the objects would almost certainly never have found their way into a Christie’s or Sotheby’s sale, partly by virtue of their extreme rarity but partly too because the prices they could be expected to fetch would have been deemed too low to make their inclusion commercially profitable.  This was true of the very first lot, a stylized feline head projecting from a limestone block. The 11th-century sculpture, which excited several bidders, sold at the middle estimate, a reasonable €3,100 ($4,400). Yet you would be hard put to find another medieval animal sculpture of that early date on the market.