Mark Rothko Francis Bacon Claude Monet Warhols Send Sotheby’s Soaring Season Opens Softly at Christie’s Tyeb Mehta The Purveyor of Modern Life Also This Month

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In addition to highlights from its October 30 sale of modern and contemporary art in neighboring Dubai, the auction house is displaying a Rothko, a Bacon, and two Monets in Abu Dhabi. The size of the show “gives you some idea of the growth and our belief that it will be consistently maintained over the next period,” said Jussi Pylkkanen, chairman of Christie's Europe. “There's no other way we'd be bringing $350 million worth of art to the Middle East.”

The Middle East is one of three regions where the auction house is hoping to make up for decreased revenue in such traditional art capitals as North America and Western Europe; the other two regions are Asia and Russia. Christie’s is hoping that big sales in emerging markets can serve as a hedge against more disappointing sales in New York, London, and Paris. “I do believe that the globalization of the art market offers some protection [against a correction],” said Pylkkanen. “In the 1970s, the 1980s, and even the 1990s, collecting art was the pastime of the rich. It's no longer the case.”

“In the early 1990s,” when the last major recession in the art market occurred, “we didn't have the breadth of buying that we have today,” he added.