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.

On December 10, Christie’s London offered a 35.36-carat blue diamond classified by the Gemological Institute of America as "fancy deep grayish blue," the finest shade for a gem of that color. Blue diamonds weighing more than 20 carats are extremely rare in any case — fewer than 10 have been recorded. Not least, the Christie’s piece was enhanced by the aura of history. The catalogue noted that its earlier owners could be traced as far back as 1664, when King Philip IV of Spain presented it to his daughter Margarita Teresa on the occasion of her betrothal to Emperor Leopold I of Austria.

The Christie’s team, however, remained unaware of a detail that reveals its art-historical context, giving a clue to its likely maker and intended recipient, and hugely increases the historical significance of the gem. While the stone comes from India, which supplied the finest diamonds to the Middle East and Europe for centuries, the geometrical pattern of the facets is Iranian. It is reproduced, among other places, in the vaulting design of countless mosque and mausoleum domes from at least the 13th century. For a stone cut prior to 1664, the selection of such a pattern can point to only one gem cutter: the Iranian poet, calligrapher and jeweler Sa’ida-ye Gilani, who moved to India at about age 20, after a fire destroyed the family house in his hometown of Lahijan, in northern Iran. Called in by the Moghul emperor Jahangir (1605-27), he was soon appointed head of the imperial jewelery workshop and was later confirmed in his position by Jahangir’s son Shah Jahan (1627-58).

Famous in his time and mentioned in several historical chronicles and anthologies of Persian poetry, both in Iran and India (where Persian was the language of literature, administration and polished intercourse at all Islamic courts), Sa’ida sank into near oblivion until 2002, when his oeuvre and biography were reconstructed on the evidence of previously untapped Persian sources from Iran and India and from objects he had wrought.

These include a carmine-red spinel. The precious historical stone was presented by Shah Abbas of Iran to Jahangir, who requested that Sa’ida record the event by incising the emperor’s name and titles on the gem. Luckily, the spinel came to light a few years ago, with inscriptions matching those Jahangir records in his memoir. Jahangir describes other precious objects that were entrusted to Sa’ida for him to inscribe. His successor, Shah Jahan, for example, commissioned Sa’ida to direct the construction of an imperial throne studded with gems, a task that took seven years.

It is highly likely that Sa’ida, as head of the imperial jewelery workshop under two emperors who admired his skills, was selected to cut a stone as rare as the blue diamond. The facts concerning Sa’ida were published by this writer (under his scholar’s signature, Assadullah Souren Melikian-Chirvani) as recently as 2002 in volume 13 of the Bulletin of the Asia Institute, an American journal of Iranian and central Asian studies printed in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. But news from the academic world spreads very slowly.

The blue diamond is the only historical diamond cut by an artist from the Islamic world that has come down to us in its original state as an admirable work of art. The other two famous historical stones, the Koh-i Noor diamond (in Persian, "the Mountain of Light") and the Timur ruby (actually a spinel), both taken out of India in British colonial times, were modified by recutting and polishing. The value of the blue diamond, intact and in its original condition, is thus hugely increased.

Laurence Graff, a world leader in diamonds who responded to the irresistible lure of the stone, stubbornly battled a Russian-born New York professional and won the contest to the tune of £16 million ($24.3 million). Graff now has reason to congratulate himself for having acquired a major if miniature work of art.

The contrast between the performance of the gem and that of the other works in the auction, which were all overrated commercial merchandise, could not have been greater. The sale of the diamond concluded a session in which only 55 percent of the lots found takers.

However, this poor showing was not due to a general collapse of the stone market. The very next day, Christie’s held a jewelery sale in New York in which the quality level was quite high, and, remarkably enough, 84 percent of the lots were sold. A few good acquisitions could be made at reasonable prices. An Art Deco Tiffany lapel watch and brooch studded with diamonds and colored gems of the "tutti-frutti" type cost $23,750, slightly below the estimate’s lower end.

On December 16 in Paris, where Christie’s was dispersing French 17th- and 18th-century decorative art, the story repeated itself. While obviously splendid pieces sold at correspondingly splendid prices, one or two brilliant coups could be made. The session ended with a group of 11 works that had been acquired at top dollar from the Paris dealer Maurice Segoura and were estimated at a maximum level. A late Louis XIV commode in the manner of André Charles Boulle, mentioned as early as 1720 in an estate inventory, shot up to €4.1 million ($5.6 million), the highest auction price for a piece of furniture in 2008. Originally commissioned by a top-level official toward the end of the reign of Louis XIV, the commode remained with the official’s descendants until the mid-1980s and thus had the cachet of history.

On the other hand, a pair of beautiful armoires probably made in the workshop run by Boulle went for €1.7 million ($2.4 million), a third less than the estimate’s low end. Unlike the commode, these pieces are not unique: Three virtually identical pairs of armoires are in existence, plus a number of later variants. It is fair to add that even though the price fell well below expectations, it remains enormous.

However, one rarity was inexpensive. A pair of cabinets in the Boulle manner made in the 1760s — but more probably adapted from earlier pieces — failed to reach the lower estimate, going for €313,000 ($429,000). The essential reason for the low price is that it takes a great connoisseur of Boulle furniture to respond to such pieces, which are unusual for their period. Their stark geometrical shape is in total contradiction with the Rococo style and its sinuous, fussy lines.

In other words, the obviously rare goes through the roof in the new market, but coups are now possible on works that have a subtle appeal, apparent only to highly specialized collectors. It only takes one or two connoisseurs to be prevented from attending an auction for the prices of rarefied pieces to remain modest. This was far less likely in spring 2008, a time when speculation-minded buyers, nudged by auction-house specialists or advised by independent consultants, all with a vested interest in selling as much as possible, scooped up pretty much everything.

In this new context, the place to go is Drouot. With all its weaknesses, the Paris auction house has two incomparable assets. Price manipulation through exaggerated reserves imposed by consignors is not as systematic at Drouot as it is at international auctions. The least powerful among the 71 auctioneering outfits registered in Paris are the most rewarding for buyers because their limited resources make it too costly for them to handle overestimated goods that may fail to match their reserves. Moreover, the proportion of property from genuinely private sources sold as part of an estate or following a change of personal circumstances is often higher at Drouot, offering buyers a good chance of finding very fine unrecorded works.

On December 19, Jean-Marc Delvaux was conducting a traditional Drouot auction in which lots ranged from minor Old Master paintings to antiquities. Warehouse dust was still ingrained in the carved gilt-wood ornament of some of the furniture. The media rarely cover such auctions because reporters do not know what to look at and find little help in catalogue descriptions that run only three or four lines.

In a typical sequence, a beautiful French gilt-wood mirror dating from about 1710 to 1720 was allowed to go for €6,619 ($9,600), well below the low estimate. This was cheap, given its appeal. Next, a large side table with a marble top of the same period, gray with dust but actually in very good condition, climbed to €20,457 ($29,600). Perfectly genuine, but not well proportioned or carved, it was on the expensive side. A rarity followed: A wrought iron coffee mill, signed around 1740 by the well-known maker Jean-Baptiste Frecon, realized the same price as the table. Although missing its handle, this small arts-and-crafts museum piece is well worth it. Another lot that attracted some attention was a cast-brass bird of prey from Moghul India. Broadly dated to the 17th or 18th century, but possibly as late as the 19th, the piece flew off to a steep €13,838 ($20,000), paid by a phone bidder through the expert Anne-Marie Kevorkian, who sat near the auctioneer’s podium and addressed her client in English.

My choice would have been a superb cartel (bracket clock), complete with its console, from the late Louis XIV period, which came after the cast-brass bird and cost €5,295 ($7,700). Even after adding a maximum of €1,000 for much-needed cleaning and sprucing up, the piece would still be the bargain of the day.

That same afternoon a few outstanding drawings in a minor key could be bought in another room, where Claude Aguttes was holding an equally diversified auction. A newly discovered preparatory study in black and red chalks for a figure appearing in Gaetano Gandolfi’s Andromache Mourning Hector drawn between 1797 and 1799, climbed to €39,654 ($56,700), triple the high estimate. Later in the sale, the appearance of two unrecorded large gouaches signed by Pierre Mongin in 1795 caused a small sensation. Ravishing in their dainty hues, the gouaches show the famous sculptural groups carved out of marble that once flanked the entrance to the Tuileries gardens on the Place de la Concorde. The pair was originally commissioned by Gérard Coustou in 1739 for the park at Marly in the Paris region and were transferred to the Place de la Concorde the year Mongin drew them. The gouaches sold for just under €50,000 ($72,200), which was double the estimate. They are nevertheless a superb acquisition given their historical relevance to a world-famous site.

Later in the sale an admirable South German cabinet in red tortoiseshell, made in the 1720s, cost €18,588 ($26,800). Visible losses of tortoiseshell strips along the base and a section of the cornice would have turned off most bidders. Such damage can easily be repaired without leaving any visible trace. The cabinet might well reappear in some international fair at double the price.

The first auctions held at Drouot this year showed no change in these trends. In a €2.6 million ($3.4 million) sale of antiquities conducted on January 17 by Pierre Bergé & Associés the star lot was an Egyptian female bust of the 1st century B.C., which once belonged to the governor of the central bank of Romania and passed in the 1940s into the hands of his son-in-law, the Romanian-born French playwright Eugène Ionesco. The connection of the bust with the recent cultural history of France and its documented pre-1970 provenance combined to send the piece skyrocketing to €620,019 ($820,000). Another work with an impeccably documented provenance, a Paros marble of Aphrodite, carved by a Greek artist in the 1st century after a 5th-century B.C. original, fetched the same price.

Both exceeded their high estimates. In that same session, however, a superb Egyptian stone bowl dated to the 3rd millennium B.C. sold under the low estimate, for only €2,480 ($3,300). As we said above, now is the time to go art-hunting.

Souren Melikian is the International Editor of Art+Auction. "Gone (Art) Hunting" originally appeared in the March 2009 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's March 2009 Table of Contents.