Gone (Art) Hunting

Francis Bacon Ellsworth Kelly Edgar Degas Andre Charles Boulle Gaetano Gandolfi Kasimir Malevich Antoine Pierre Mongin Barnett Newman

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For genuine collectors, who buy art because they want to live in the midst of beautiful pictures and objects, the outlook is rosier than it has been in a very long time. The tempest unleashed in the financial world last fall has cleared up much of the mess resulting from years of art-market manipulation.

The November 2008 sales in New York provided the first indication that the rise of art prices systematically whipped up by auction houses was coming to an end. For years, they had encouraged hosts of newcomers who knew little about art and even less about art-market practice to enter the auction arena. These buyers gladly purchased art on the terms suggested by departmental heads or self-appointed consultants who also had a vested interest in prices being ever higher. The worsening economic troubles of the fall have driven away scores of these new buyers who once so obligingly took estimates at face value.

Remarkably, though, there has been no repeat of the 1990 art-market crash. The drying up of art supplies has dramatically accelerated in the interval, and as a result, those who buy art out of deep-seated conviction feel that, these days, they cannot afford to pass on immensely desirable works. In a few cases, they are even prepared to send prices soaring higher than ever before. An early November auction at Sotheby’s proved that there is no sign of buyers’ fatigue when it comes to works perceived as wonderfully unique and important. At the house’s Impressionist and modern evening sale, a $60 million Malevich became the most expensive Russian painting ever sold and a Degas pastel set a world record for a work on paper when it brought $37 million.

But with the economic crisis, the thousands of bidders who only a year ago were happy to shed millions on works glamorized by their signatures and the noise made around them have deserted the scene. Overrated paintings and objects of no particular merit that might have sold in past months are now dropping dead in the water. Buyers who continue to spend vast amounts are those who appear to be able to make their own informed judgments.

There was still plenty of money around for exceptional works at the Christie’s sale of postwar and contemporary art last November 12. One buyer paid $2.1 million for a Barnett Newman drawing in black ink that ranks among the most remarkable works on paper of the New York School in the 1960s. But when Francis Bacon’s pedestrian self-portrait, whose only distinctive feature is a head twisted out of shape, as if perceived in a hallucinogenic vision, came up with an extravagant $40 million estimate, it crashed without eliciting the slightest interest from a stone-faced audience.

Significantly, there were downward price corrections on works seen as desirable but not unforgettable. A number of pictures sold only because the team at Christie’s had been able to persuade consignors to bring down estimates and reserves before the sale. A typical example was an untitled picture painted by Ellsworth Kelly in 1961 that can only be described as a solid-green blob on a white ground. It cost $1.7 million — still a whopping price, even if well below the $2 million-to-$3 million estimate that had been agreed upon in the hubristic days preceding the financial crisis.

The Christie’s sale was thus the first major event to outline the characteristics of the new environment in which art lovers must now operate. While the rise of out-of-this-world rarities is unstoppable, a serious revision of artificially inflated overall price levels is going on. The flight of 11th-hour art-market converts will continue to reduce speculation-driven acquisitions, with two consequences. First, mediocrities will fall unsold by the dozens. Second, with the end of indiscriminately bullish bidding, some very fine but unobtrusive works of which the quality is perceptible only to the most sophisticated buyers, will occasionally sell at very approachable prices.

The December 2008 sales fully bore out the new trends, especially in the jewelery category. Although jewelery represents the ultimate dispensable luxury and would therefore seem to be a likely victim of the recession, it turned out to be the field in which the year’s most astonishing feat was achieved.