Pablo Picasso Rene Magritte Edgar Degas Claude Monet Pierre-Auguste Renoir Edouard Manet Camille Pissarro Amedeo Modigliani

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In this column last November, Marc Porter, of Christie’s, argued that art has an absolute value entirely independent of its fluctuating commercial price. He is right, of course. But art’s commercial price is deeply fascinating, too. Its ebbs and flows are a revealing barometer of taste and aspiration, and its surges are the source of huge public titillation.

Money and art are a riveting combination. People love it when a painting sells for millions. I sometimes wonder why museums don’t exploit this. Why not display next to each exhibit the figure for which it’s insured? The information would add several hundred yards to the queue for the next Monet blockbuster.

I recently wrote a book about the transformation of perhaps the most valuable category of all, The Ultimate Trophy: How the Impressionist Painting Conquered the World (Prestel). When the first Impressionist paintings were exhibited, in the 1870s, people were horrified by their modernity, and no one bought them. A hundred years later, those same paintings had become the most popular and accessible art in the world, and the ultimate blue- chip investment. The collision between art and money is at its most intriguing with the Impressionists. Why, for instance, is every generation of new wealth drawn to them as to a magnet?

One reason is the expertise that has been brought to bear on this category. There is always room for critical uncertainty over Old Masters, even major ones. But thanks to the foresight of dealers like Durand-Ruel and Bernheim-Jeune, which kept comprehensive photographic records of work by the artists they handled, it has been relatively easy to establish unchallengeable catalogues raisonnés of the major Impressionists.

So if you’ve made a lot of money but don’t necessarily know a lot about art, you can be sure that the Monet or the Renoir you’re buying is the real thing. It’s recorded. There’s no possibility you could wake up one morning and find that your Impressionist painting has been downgraded by a bunch of crazy academics to the work of a follower, as sometimes happens to the unfortunate owners of Rembrandts.

Today the very best Impressionist paintings are enduring emblems of great wealth, creating for their owners an image of traditional taste and substance. These nouveaux riches collectors turn to the works for an affirmation of status. In contrast, those who collect more-difficult contemporary works aspire to a more daring and avant-garde image.

If Théodore Duret, the pioneering patron of Manet, Monet and Pissarro in the 1870s, were alive today, would he be buying Impressionism or Conceptual art? Probably the latter: He was attracted to the cutting edge. The only thing he might be surprised by is the number of people now conditioned to join him in taking a risk on new, unproven art. We live in an age that, more than ever before, equates novelty with quality.

The appeal of the Impressionist paintings today is no longer edgy. By comparison with works by Modigliani or Magritte or Picasso, they seem old-fashioned. They have been overlaid with history. But that doesn’t mean they lack an audience. People find the works attractive because of the brightness of their colors, the serenity of their subject matter and the allure of the period they document. Collectors like the recognizability of the style and the lingering romance that attaches to Impressionist painters as the harbingers of modern art — men and women who weren’t understood in their own time. Not the least satisfying part of the enduring Impressionist myth is the reassurance it brings of human progress and the opportunity it provides for the smugness of hindsight. This is art that was difficult for the artists’ poor, misguided contemporaries to comprehend but that is easy to grasp for us, their enlightened descendants.

Over recent years the emerging economies — Russia, China, India and the countries of the Middle East — have spawned increasing numbers of superrich collectors who have been drawn into the art market. A sizable proportion of them have bought Impressionist paintings. So new money’s enchantment with the Impressionists repeats itself, on a more globalized scale. But as banks collapsed and financial markets went into meltdown at the end of 2008, dealers and auction houses held their breath. Would demand for such expensive art carry through into the new year?

The answer turned out to be an emphatic yes. At the unexpectedly successful Sotheby’s and Christie’s London sales that were held in February, the highest prices were achieved by a Degas — the posthumous bronze Petite danseuse de quatorze ans, 1922, which brought £13.3 million ($19 million) — and a Monet, Dans la prairie, 1876, fetching £11.2 million ($16.1 million). There was continuing competition from buyers hailing from the emerging economies. New collectors entered the fray.

Great Impressionist art is rare. Naysayers note that the quantity of good works available is not the same as it was a generation ago, and they’re right. But this rarity drives up bidding. How will the sparkling early Renoir Jeune femme à l’ombrelle, 1868, do on May 5 at Sotheby’s, which has estimated the painting at $700,000 to $900,000? However it plays out, the high price tag attached to the whole category is part of its appeal. Buying an Impressionist painting goes beyond investment and becomes an assertion of wealth, both cultural and financial. In other words, such work is still the ultimate trophy.

Philip Hook is the senior director of Impressionist and modern art at Sotheby’s and the author of The Ultimate Trophy: How the Impressionist Painting Conquered the World. "Always in Style" originally appeared in the May 2009 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's May 2009 Table of Contents.