Trophy Hunting

Alberto Giacometti Joan Miro Edouard Vuillard Auguste Rodin Edgar Degas Claude Monet Fernand Leger Camille Pissarro

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While Christie’s May 6 evening session, which opened the spring season and was brilliantly conducted by Christopher Burge, ended in financial triumph, with 44 works bringing a total of $277.3 million, the attendance was not exactly bubbling with mirth. Rather, the mood was one of prudence and concentration, with no one indulging in the bouts of prankish spending on a sudden whim that seemed sometimes to characterize last fall’s sales.

The new attitude may account for the peculiar makeup of the sale, in which quality contrasts were more marked than usual. Three lots of stellar importance stood out, buttressed by half a dozen extremely good paintings and sculptures, in the midst of a host of unremarkable works. There is nothing mysterious about this imbalance: When owners feel unsure about the probable outcome of success at auction, even though art has so far been performing very well, they take precautions.

Holders of exceptionally important works will release them only if the auction houses agree to huge estimates with commensurate reserves and, often, guarantees; consignors are thus assured of tidy profits. Holders of pieces that are extremely good but not spectacular are more reluctant to let them go, fearing that these might not find takers and could be commercially harmed by public failure. On the other hand, owners of weak works graced by well-known signatures readily consign them, reckoning that the shortage of goods and the presence of new buyers provide a better chance than ever to unload them.

Did this atmosphere of ill-defined unease impel auction-house specialists to take extra care in preparing the sale during the weeks preceding it? At the viewing, Thomas Seydoux, the remarkable connoisseur of Impressionist and modern art who heads Christie’s international department together with Guy Bennett, told me that they had exerted themselves more than usual. This could explain the large number of absentee bids, left with Christie’s staff before the sale, which played no mean part in the brilliant outcome of the session.

At first, the auction appeared to proceed very easily. It began with the highly geometric white plaster sculpture Homme (Apollon), molded by Alberto Giacometti in 1929. The dainty structure, only 16 ⅛ inches high, belongs to the early phase of the sculptor’s career. A touch of cartoonlike humor, highly popular these days, and instant legibility helped send the piece flying to $3.6 million, nearly triple its high estimate.

A gouache by Joan Miró followed. Done in the manner of six-year-olds enjoying themselves with brush and paint pot, it bore the stamp of what I term fun Surrealism laced with Dada absurdity and shot up to a suitably comical $1.2 million.

The third lot, a nearly abstract Cubist painting done by Georges Braque around 1913, could easily have run into trouble. The small oval format is out of favor, and the color scheme in browns, grays and off-whites enhances the severity of its composition. The estimate, $3 million to $4 million, seemed optimistic. Yet Verre et pipe Jour ascended to $3.8 million.

The auction seemed on course as all but one of the first 10 lots sold, the exception being Fernand Léger’s harshly oversimplified Jeune homme au chandail, which was so unappealing that its failure appeared inevitable and thus of no consequence. The atmosphere gradually changed, however. Enormous prices were paid here and there, and six world records were set, while mediocrities fell unwanted. It was one of the most curious sessions I remember attending, with intense interest, triggered by true rarities, alternating with moody boredom as works of limited merit came up and nevertheless sold, sometimes quite well, for which credit surely goes to the spadework done by the Christie’s team.

Signac’s 1907 La Corne d’or (Constantinople), a late Pointilliste view of Istanbul that looks like a tourism poster broken up into color splinters to suit the painter’s theories about the rendition of light, nevertheless climbed to $6.6 million. The next three lots appeared hopeless. Kees Van Dongen’s large portrait of a standing dancer unveiling her charms, unredeemed by remnants of the painter’s Fauvist color scheme, stood no chance of making its estimate of $12 million to $16 million, given the buyers’ sober mood. Sure enough, it fell unsold. Miraculously, an uninspired Camille Pissarro landscape done in 1893 at Éragny in an unsuccessful attempt at Pointillisme managed to fetch $1.3 million. But Près de Vétheuil—a messy daub that was stamped twice with Claude Monet’s signature and made you wonder how on earth the Christie’s specialists could have allowed it to stray into their prestigious evening sale—crashed without triggering any bids.

Luckily, the Monet, dispatched by the auctioneer in a matter of seconds, was followed immediately by the first highly important work of the week. Rodin’s Ève, grand modèle—version sans rocher cast in the large, 68 ⅛ inches high, version by François Rudier in 1897, is a pivotal work representing a transition from the Classical past to modernity. The image of a woman standing in the nude, head bent and arms clasping her chest, goes back to the Bashful Venus of Roman antiquity, while the rough handling of the body and the rugged surface herald 20th-century statuary. The Christie’s piece was the first trial proof cast by Rudier and, as such, the first that would have been approved by Rodin. It is also the biggest of all Rodin’s bronzes. On June 19, 1999, at Sotheby’s London, it had already set a world record for the artist, fetching £4.6 million ($9.1 million). This week, it » raised the record to $19 million, an impressive jump even in melting dollars. The price reflects the inexorable rise of museum-quality works, driven both by a growing awareness that opportunities missed may never recur and by new buyers with a surfeit of cash hunting for trophies.

The impressive performance of Rodin’s Ève was strikingly paralleled by that of Giacometti’s Grande femme debout II. The tall lady was the first in an edition of six cast at the Susse Foundry, in Paris, in 1960, months after the sculptor molded the plaster model, and at almost nine feet high it is bigger by several inches than series I, III and IV. Not least, the sculpture matches to perfection the popular idea of Giacometti’s work, making it what the media like to call an icon. It too set a world record for the artist, raising the bar to $27.5 million, high above the previous $18.5 million paid as recently as May 9, 2007, at Christie’s New York for another bronze, L’homme qui chavire.

An even more revealing record was set moments later, as Monet’s 1873 Le pont du chemin de fer à Argenteuil fetched $41.5 million. Described in words, the work sounds fantastic. It depicts an industrial subject, an avant-garde idea at the time, as noted in the long catalogue entry. More important is its portrayal of springtime: Looking at the white clouds running high up across the pale blue sky and at the rippling water of the river, you almost feel the freshness of the morning breeze. Yet this is far from being Monet’s greatest work. Sadly for new institutions and trophy seekers, not much from this early Impressionist phase of his work remains outside museums, so they must chase the second-tier pieces. It was a stroke of genius on the part of the Nahmad family of dealers to have seen this moment coming long ago. They bought the Monet at Sotheby’s London in November 1988 for a sum then equivalent to $12.4 million. Their releasing the painting this May proves that these experienced professionals had no doubt about the strength injected into the market by a wave of new buyers who, for the moment, happily go along with the estimates given by auction rooms. For the Monet, the estimate “on request,” quoted to me minutes before the sale began, was a flat $35 million, rather than the usual low and high price bracket, as if it were nonnegotiable. Christie’s must have worked hard to see that this estimate was matched. There came only two bids above $35 million, and Christopher Burge’s hammer quickly fell at $37 million, almost as if all parties knew what would happen.

One got the same impression when Édouard Vuillard’s Fillettes se promenant, a large close-up of two young girls walking, set another record. Painted in 1891 at the height of the Nabi movement, the scene, with its simplified forms and flat contrasted colors, is highly expressive and instantly legible. These traits make the picture another icon and, in this large size, an ideal trophy. Not many ran after it, though. Although the painting made a huge $8 million, the hammer price was only $100,000 above the low estimate. Here, too, the Christie’s team must have worked hard singing the picture’s merits to prospective clients. And one or two bidders are enough to make the difference between triumph and failure.

In short, in the market today, discourse matters more than artistic merit. Even famous names may fail to help works jump their reserve hurdles when connoisseurship is needed to apprehend their beauty and so accept high estimates. Van Gogh’s View at the Edge of Paris with a Farmer Carrying a Spade on his Shoulder, an admirable landscape painted on the outskirts of Paris in 1887, when the Dutch-born master had just discovered Impressionism, crashed unsold that evening, as Burge called out a fictitious $8 million bid, far below the $13 million low estimate. The picture betrays the artist’s familiarity with Alfred Sisley’s and Pissarro’s Divisionist paintings, and yet it is utterly different. Van Gogh’s intense color dots sparkle, and his composition has a directness alien to both Impressionists. The painting is a landmark in his oeuvre, an early dated example of his radical transformation of Impressionism from naturalism to expressiveness, realized through color and brushwork.

The failure of this marvelous van Gogh was sandwiched between the $1.2 million sale of Degas’s Danseuse au tambourin, a weak ballet scene left knocking about the painter’s studio at his death, as indicated by a stamped signature supplied by the estate, and the unloading of Gauguin’s 1892 Te fare Hymenee (La maison des chants), a Tahitian scene probably executed in a moment of profound exhaustion or bewilderment, bought by an anonymous telephone bidder for $8.4 million.

The same bidder also bagged a Degas pastel with a stamped signature, Trois danseuses, for $4.3 million, nearly 20 percent below the low estimate. The buyer may have felt that these acquisitions were bargains. Unfortunately, they betray closer familiarity with price charts and other market research than with art.

In the Sotheby’s evening sale, on May 7, which Tobias Meyer conducted briskly, the percentage of failures was slightly lower. Bidders, whether in the room or on the phones, appeared to have gained confidence following Christie’s performance the evening before, which had been brilliant from a financial perspective. The Sotheby’s sale otherwise bore a striking resemblance to the Christie’s evening session. World records were set, two of them for highly important paintings.

The first and most impressive record, $39.2 million, was for Léger’s Étude pour “La femme en bleu,” which carries two dates, 1912 and 1913. A reworking of a composition in the Léger Museum, in the small French town of Biot, the study was influenced by Cubism and represents a stepping stone to the artist’s series “Contrastes de forme.” A glorious pedigree and an extensive list of exhibition appearances, all in Germany (Léger first sent it to the avant-garde art show held at the Galerie Der Sturm, in Berlin, in 1913), helped the picture match exactly the lower end of its gigantic estimate. Here too competition was limited.

The next record price—$30.8 million for Edvard Munch’s 1902 Girls on a Bridge—reflected greater enthusiasm. The picture, which foreshadows Expressionism in its extreme simplification of form and the thrust in the characters’ motions as well as in the lines defining the perspective, surpassed its upper estimate of $28 million.

The search for the kind of trophies that are the flavor of the year—large works with simple forms, contrasting colors (if two dimensional) and a modernist expressiveness that hits the eye from far away—went all the way down the monetary scale. Nu à la fleur by Georges Valmier, a lightweight in 20th-century French art, was boldly estimated by the house at $500,000 to $700,000. Like much of Valmier’s oeuvre, the 1928 painting displays the influence of pre–World War I Cubism in its trompe l’oeil suggestion of superposed cutouts and that of Surrealism in its fantasy. The canvas, 38 inches high, easily met expectations, fetching $657,000.

Victor Brauner’s Tableau autobiographique—ultratableau biosensible, dated March 1948, falls in the category of fun Surrealism, with a fair dose of Dada-inherited absurdity conveyed in pseudochildish style. Like the Valmier, it is big, has contrasting colors and catches the eye from at least 10 yards away. At $993,000, it now holds the world record for a Brauner.

Several extremely high prices confirmed the stimulating effect that trophy hunting has on the market for Impressionist and modern art, regardless of school or style. Large sculptures typical of famous artists sold like hotcakes. Giacometti’s Femme de Venise VIII, cast in 1957 in an edition of six, rose to $10.1 million. And a very unusual Picasso bronze bird, cast between 1952 and 1954 in an edition of four, each individually painted, rose to a stunning $19.2 million, helped by its touch of fun Surrealism.

At Sotheby’s, as at Christie’s, art with fine nuances proved unpopular. A beautiful signed and dated Pissarro landscape painted at Louveciennes illustrates a crucial moment in art history, when French naturalism, with its melancholy Romanticism, was mutating into Impressionism. The colors are subdued, and the mood is as subtle as the delicate brushwork, which is very modern in its sketchiness. These qualities are not in favor today. As the bids called out by Meyer reached $950,000, no one in the room showed any interest. The auctioneer quickly brought down his hammer. That week, when money poured so readily, one more gem had failed to catch the attention of the new buyers.

"Trophy Hunting" originally appeared in the July 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's July 2008 Table of Contents.