The Greatest Temptations

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GOING, GOING, GONE

In the art market, sometimes the deals that don't happen are just as memorable as the ones that do.

Cy Twombly Camille Pissarro Federico Barocci Adriaen Coorte Lucas Cranach the Elder Ottmar Elliger Vincent van Gogh Leonardo da Vinci

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As a passionate observer of the international art market, Souren Melikian knows a good thing when he sees it. Of all the works for sale this past year, here's what he would have bought. 

Collecting is a passion, some would say an addiction, to which the only known remedy is more of the same. The problems begin when the remedy keeps changing, as it does these days. The massive entry of new buyers leads to ever-dwindling supplies, making it difficult to build up collections within closely defined categories—there just aren’t enough desirable works left knocking around. Another consequence is that estimates become unreliable, prices often defying expectations. Thus each work must be bought solely on its own merits. This is evident in Old Master drawings, now a scarce commodity. In New York, Christie’s and Sotheby’s each hold at the most two auctions a year.

This year I would have been tempted to buy just twice in this category, both times at Sotheby’s on January 23, when the Italian drawings amassed by Jeffrey Horvitz were being dispersed. Possibly fearing that he did not have enough experience to assess the validity of attributions, Horvitz appears to have played it safe by often acquiring sketches related to signed or documented paintings that established their authorship beyond doubt. Sometimes, though, it was his flair for recognizing quality that yielded top-tier purchases.

In 1998 he bought an enchanting red chalk sketch of a girl with the shadow of a youthful smile from Flavia Ormond Fine Arts, of London. When offered at Sotheby’s New York earlier that year, on January 28, it had been catalogued as an anonymous 16th-century Italian work. A British Museum curator, Hugo Chapman, was the first to propose an attribution to Parmigianino, as Girolamo Francesco Maria Mazzola is known, but the clinching evidence was published in 1999 by David Ekserdjian, a distinguished British specialist in Renaissance painting, who associated the sketch with the head of Mary in Parmigianino’s Vision of Saint Jerome, which was commissioned in 1526. At Sotheby’s in January, this important addition to Parmigianino’s drawing corpus was a delightful, if not cheap, acquisition at $73,000.

I would have cracked even more easily at the sight of a sheer masterpiece by Federico Barocci, whose masterly black and red chalk portrait of a young woman with a joyous smile on her closed lips is probably a studio elaboration of an earlier sketch. The same woman also appears as one of the figures in the crowd gazing at Mary in Barocci’s famous La Madonna del Popolo, which hangs in the Uffizi, in Florence. Horvitz’s drawing was exhibited twice at the Royal Academy, in London, and is illustrated in Andrea Emiliani’s two-volume study of Barocci, published in 1985. You can’t do much better than that. At $193,000, the splendid likeness was not even particularly expensive.

To land great works by Old Masters, you must climb higher on the financial ladder, although not wildly higher. The only problem is that the purchase of a Dutch still life of the 17th century or portraits by the finest German Renaissance artists requires extensive exposure to art of this kind in order for the buyer to take in all the nuances of composition and mood in the picture. Many present-day buyers have their eyes so exclusively attuned to the primary colors and simplified forms of 21st-century urban scenery that they have difficulty looking at Old Masters. As a result, if you are willing to stray off the beaten path, finding masterpieces at moderate prices is feasible.

Walking through a selling show that Johnny Van Haeften put up last December in his Duke Street gallery, in London, I stopped dead in my tracks in front of a forest ground still life signed by Ottmar Elliger the Elder in 1666. By then the German painter, who had spent his career in Holland, was living in Hamburg. The picture has an intensity and a mystery that make it unlike any work from the Dutch school of which he is considered to be part—misleadingly in my view. Grapes and plums, brightly lit, are suspended against a backdrop of darkness. Two butterflies have just alighted on leaves, and a grasshopper has its antennae warily tilted at divergent angles, as if weighing whether to jump. There is an irresistible fairy-tale atmosphere of expectancy about the scene. At £125,000 ($257,850), this remarkable picture by a rare painter was a bargain I would have loved to pounce on.