Rarity Rules

Pablo Picasso Chaim Soutine Joan Miro Marc Chagall Raoul Dufy Wassily Kandinsky Gino Severini Edgar Degas

Send a letter to the Editor

Save to Del.icio.us Digg this

Buying Impressionist and modern masters is becoming an ever more fascinating but increasingly dangerous sport for those whose bank accounts allow them to join the art race. As rarity becomes extreme, the obvious trophies at the top of the art ladder fetch prices that no expert could have predicted. On the other hand, rarity can have the opposite effect when it comes to subtle masterpieces that only an eye accustomed to art can recognize.

The latest round of Impressionist and modern masters sales, held in London last June, spectacularly illustrated the divergent fates of works that benefit from celebrity and masterpieces that have only their quality in their favor. It also underlined as never before the near impossibility of estimating value, as several pictures shot up to huge prices disproportionate to their merits.

Take the two most expensive Impressionist works offered in the June 24 Christie’s auction, which turned out to be the most successful ever in Europe, with proceeds adding up to £144.4 million ($284 million). One picture, painted by Monet, was truly of considerable importance, while the other, a Degas pastel, did little to enhance the great master’s aura.

Monet’s Le bassin aux nymphéas, 1919, a close-up of water lilies floating on the pond in the garden he designed on the grounds of his Giverny estate, near Paris, is one of about 30 large-scale paintings of this subject that the artist painted between 1903 and 1926. The series sums up the master’s ultimate artistic meditation about the relationship between light, color and human perception. This particular canvas is one of the few that are both fully finished and signed, proving that Monet, satisfied with his endeavor, intended them to be seen by the public. It is part of a set of four, of which one was damaged by being cut in two and the two others now hang in museums. That made the picture at Christie’s a rarity to be fought over at all costs, even if it is not the greatest of all the Nymphéas. Estimated at £18 million to £24 million ($35.5–$47.3 million), it flew to a record £40.9 million ($80.5 million). Had I been a museum curator looking for a major work from the period when Monet was edging closer to abstraction, I would have gone for it, but as a collector I would have abstained. The picture lacks the magic of the greatest canvases in the series. Instead of fading into an ethereal colored blur, the water lilies are massed heavily on the right and appear to be crushed against the upper edge of the composition. Its record price was due as much to the impossibility of finding a better, fully signed, version in the market as to the work’s real mastery.

No such quality could be easily detected in the second most expensive Impressionist work in the Christie’s sale, a pastel by Degas, Danseuses à la barre. The study of two young ballet dancers training to do splits during a class climbed to an astounding £13.5 million ($26.5 million). Done around 1880, it is clumsily drawn, betraying the difficulty the artist sometimes had when rendering humans or animals in motion. The girls’ raised legs are painfully awkward, and the hesitant charcoal outlines only emphasize their shapelessness. How the outstanding Christie’s team of specialists could bring themselves to sing to high heaven this botched essay is a mystery. Perhaps they succumbed to a mirage, like thirsty wanderers in an artistic desert.

Monet’s Coucher de soleil à Lavacourt offered another example of inexplicable enthusiasm. The landscape, which Christie’s honored with a four-page catalogue essay, was dashed off in 1880. The paint does not even fully cover the canvas, as it does in the three other landscapes reproduced in the catalogue entry for comparative purposes. The hastily scribbled sunset view could be a first attempt at the composition used in Soleil couchant sur la Seine, effet d’hiver, which is held in the permanent collection of Paris’s Petit Palais. If confirmed, this connection would give the Christie’s painting unquestionable art-historical interest, amusingly overlooked in the lengthy commentary, without quite justifying the generous price it achieved: £2.4 million ($4.7 million).