Beyond Celebrity

Man Ray Constantin Brancusi Henri Matisse Giorgio de Chirico Paul Klee Marcel Duchamp James Ensor Thomas Gainsborough

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The three-day auction in which the various collections amassed by the late French couturier Yves Saint Laurent and his close friend and business partner Pierre Bergé were dispersed at Christie’s Paris from February 23 to February 25 is unique in market annals, no matter what standards are applied to assess it.

The total sold, €373.9 million ($483.8 million), is unprecedented anywhere, and so is the exceptionally low failure rate in a sale of that size, a mere 5 percent. The works on offer ranged from 20th-century paintings to German silver-gilt of the Renaissance and the Baroque age to Art Deco — and more. Briefly put, the stunning outcome of the Saint Laurent-Bergé event has proved beyond possible doubt that the art market on one hand and the general economy on the other do follow spectacularly divergent paths, as I have been pointing out since October.

It must be remembered that the auction took place at a time when worldwide gloom was already deep on the economic front. Bergé said at the press conference held at the end of the February 25 session that he had rejected suggestions that the sale be postponed.

So taken aback were most media commentators by the stupendous success of the auction in such an untoward economic environment that some felt obliged to invoke factors unrelated to art. It was the celebrity effect, one reader claimed in a letter to an international daily. But such an explanation does not hold water when one considers the experienced collectors and seasoned dealers who furiously bid against each other on German silver-gilt, painted enamel wares from 16th-century Limoges and other rarefied antiques. Buyers such as these would not have been swayed by the fame of Saint Laurent or Bergé.

The first factor behind the phenomenal success of the auction was psychological, but of a very different order. The sheer number of works, many of good to very good quality, created the critical mass that triggered a chain reaction such as had never been witnessed in the auction arena, and the astonishing tempo was kept up from beginning to end.

The tone was set in the first few moments on February 23 as the session devoted to 19th- and 20th-century avant-garde art took off. Of the 61 lots that came up, 59 were sold for a total of €206 million ($267 million), making it the biggest single-owner sale ever in the field. This outweighs even the celebrated Victor and Sally Ganz sale held at Christie’s New York in 1997.

Remarkably, out of the seven record prices paid that day, six went to works that would not have seemed to warrant particular enthusiasm.

This began with a group portrait by James Ensor, Pierrot in Despair, painted in 1892. The eight circus characters with part-comical part-tragic expressions that fill a composition bordering on the genre scene lack the dramatic stridency for which the Belgian Symbolist is sought after. Nevertheless, Pierrot in Despair was saluted with loudly joyous applause from the room as it ended its upward course at an extravagant €5 million ($6.5 million).

This, though, was nothing compared with the performance of a wooden sculpture carved by Brancusi between 1914 and 1917. Despite a title that suggests a figural likeness, Madame L.R. (Portrait de Madame L.R.) looks like a variation on the theme of some African totem made up from abstract geometrical volumes. It bears no connection to the sleek stone or brass sculptures leaning toward abstraction that have made the Romanian-born artist famous. Realizing a breathtaking €29.2 million ($37.8 million), the portrait of Mrs. L.R. became the most expensive Brancusi ever auctioned.

Moments later, it was the turn of Piet Mondrian’s Composition in Blue, Red, Yellow and Black of 1922 to set a world auction record at €21.56 million ($27.9 million). Here there was good reason. Superbly preserved, unlike many works by the artist, the Composition shows up Mondrian’s bold sense of space and color balance at its finest.

The next three auction records were more unexpected. Les coucous, tapis bleu et rose, painted by Matisse in 1911, at a time when the French master was experimenting in several directions, no longer has the vibrant colors of the Fauve phase that had ended four years earlier. However, it offers a rare case of Surrealist influence over the painter with its ambivalence in image and word. The word coucous in the title can be understood to refer to birds or to flowers, and the composition shows both — bird silhouettes can be made out on the rug. As with the Brancusi, the appeal of such a work owes more to art history than to the art itself. The world record price that the Matisse fetched on February 23, €35.9 million ($46.5 million) is as astounding as the Brancusi record.

Nor could connoisseurs conceal their surprise when Giorgio de Chirico’s The Ghost of 1917 became the next world-record picture, at €11 million ($14 million). It has neither the fantasy of de Chirico’s most inventive pictures, nor the painterly qualities of his most accomplished work. This, one heard, would go to the Centre Pompidou, Paris, a National Museums Agency representative having stated the intention of the French state to exercise its "preemption" privilege.

There was more (some would say worse) to come. Paul Klee’s Garden Figure of 1932 nearly quadrupled its estimate at €4 million ($5 million), propelled by the current vogue of Surrealism in its most simplistic vein.

The cult of the absurd peaked that day when a toilet water flask picked up by Marcel Duchamp, the inventor of the Dada movement, brought €8.9 million ($11.5 million). What distinguishes it from hundreds of toilet water flasks sold by the Paris perfumer Rigaud is the label pasted on it. Conceived by Duchamp, it was designed by his friend Man Ray. The phrase coined by Duchamp, "Belle Haleine: Eau de Voilette" (Lovely Breath: Veil Water) is a phonetic parody of "Belle Hélène: Eau de Toilette" (Lovely Helen: Toilet Water). In a tiny oval inset, the photograph of Duchamp dressed up as a woman completed this kind of joke called by French high school boys in their late teens a canular, or tongue-in-cheek absurd prank. This was Duchamp’s way of conveying his contempt for the wealthy establishment and its artistic sense — or the lack thereof. The intellectual anarchist that he was never dreamt that his expression of derision would one day be elevated to the status of multimillion-dollar "art." As world records go, this one should hold for a while.

As the two-hour session wound down on February 23, art market professionals looked both dazed and ecstatic. They had witnessed a historic moment. The divergence of the art market from the economy had been established in the field that had been leading the art market for decades, Impressionist and modern paintings and sculpture. Could this be the response of distraught investors seeking a safe haven for their liquidities in a world that seemed to be collapsing around them?

The answer, a firm no, came on February 24, when the spotlight switched to areas where buying requires far greater sophistication and experience. These too gave rise to phenomenal outbursts of enthusiasm, thus dismissing the theory of the panicked investor looking for easy-to-buy art.

The session opened with Old Master paintings, and these were a mixed bag. The first pictures to come up were a pair of panels from 16th-century Germany respectively dealing with the birth and martyrdom of Saint John the Baptist. When offered separately at Christie’s London in 1971, both had failed to sell. This year, the pair soared to €457,000 ($591,312), a gigantic price for mildly interesting anonymous paintings. A Pieter de Hooch interior scene doomed by its distressed condition then crashed unwanted, followed by a rather conventional Portrait of a Lady done by Cornelis de Vos in the 1620s, well sold at €121,000 ($156,561). This led up to the first significant test, the portrait of a man holding a book, signed by Frans Hals, which did not quite have the sharp edge of the Dutch master’s greatest works. But these are no longer seen at auction and bidders went berserk, setting the world auction record for Hals at €3.5 million ($4.6 million).

Two Italian paintings of no great consequence which sold easily served as a transition to the second meaningful test, Gainsborough’s portrait of an Italian singer, famous in his time, Giusto Ferdinando Tenducci. Done in the mid-1770s, the Portrait of Giusto Tenducci is a far cry from the formal likenesses of aristocratic patrons by the English painter that occasionally turn up. Nothing like it had been offered in the open market for years. Tenducci sang its way up to €2.9 million ($3.6 million). This too was a world auction record for the artist.

Add a third, stupendous record, €2.1 million ($2.7 million), which greeted the oval portrait of a young woman by Ingres, the Comtesse de la Rue, done in 1812 in a dry precise manner, and the session could not have done better at the height of the market.

Yet, that triumph was outshone the same day, first by the German silver-gilt vessels and then by the furniture and objects that had adorned the apartment of Saint Laurent and Bergé.

Every single piece of German silver-gilt was sold, the rarer objects fetching unheard of prices. An armillary sphere carried by the Greek mythological figure of Chronos (Time), represented as a man in the nude, his silver body fitted with silver-gilt wings, rose to €781,000 ($1 million), more than doubling expectations. Extremely rare in today’s market, the object, which was made by the Augsburg goldsmith Jakob Mannlich in Troppau (now Opava in the Czech Republic), dates from about 1630, but is hardly the greatest work ever by a German goldsmith of the Baroque Age.

By comparison, the one object worthy of the greatest museums, a silver-gilt dish made between 1562 and 1586 by Abraham I. Lotter of Augsburg, almost looked reasonable at €661,000 ($855,267). Set in the center with the enameled coat of arms of the Margrave Karl II of Baden-Durlach dated 1561, the vessel commemorates the German prince’s conversion to the Augsburg Confession, which is the founding text of Lutheran Protestantism as defined by Jacob Heerbrand. That year, the Margrave declared his adherence to the new faith at the Protestant Congress in Naumburg. With such a weight of history, the dazzling object was worth as much as you can pay.

Not so the dozens of pieces that doubled, tripled or quadrupled their high estimates. Immediately before the armillary sphere, a silver-gilt cup and cover made around 1660 by Johann Adam Kienlin the Elder in the Swabian city of Ulm went up to €113,800 ($147,246), more than four times the highest price expected by Christie’s. Kienlin the Elder was a prolific artist, as the catalogue noted.

Pieces described in the most unflattering terms, such as a silver-gilt-mounted nautilus cup with the goldsmith’s mark of Elias Adam of Augsburg corresponding to the years 1711-1715, were as vividly fought over as if they had been unobtainable treasures. A damning caveat in the catalogue entry specified that comparison with "a similar nautilus shell dated 1720 with the same stem and mounts sold [at] Sotheby’s, Geneva, 18 May 1992" indicates that "the present nautilus shell [in the Paris sale] is probably a replacement and the mounts [were] adapted to fit." Bluntly put, Christie’s saw it as a partly modern piece with badly altered 18th-century mounts. The €10,000 to €15,000 estimate (plus the 25 percent sale charge) seemed very optimistic, and yet in the event, Christie’s was shown to have erred on the side of caution. The made-up object went up to a mind-boggling €133,000 ($172,089).

The bullishness displayed by the buyers in such a highly specialized field as German silver-gilt wares of the 16th and 17th centuries, and on such a large scale (82 lots), has no precedent.

Had the rage to buy stopped there, it would have been amazing enough. But when the auction switched to Art Deco, plus a few more recent pieces made in the spirit of Art Nouveau, enthusiasm rose to truly stratospheric heights.

Right at the beginning, a pair of candelabra in gilt brass and galvanized copper, signed in 1990 by the designer Claude Lalanne, tripled their estimate at €253,000 ($327,357). Two lots down, an ornamental carp in gold patinated resin, 11 inches long, multiplied the high estimate tenfold as it brought €97,000 ($125,508). Its style, reminiscent of sleek Art Deco animal sculpture, is decidedly passé. More surprising still, a pair of Macassar ebony armchairs modestly catalogued as "anonymous French work circa 1930" shot up to €133,000 ($172,089), nine times the high estimate. Unless someone spotted some period reproduction with a caption naming the designer, this is a staggering figure.

Naturally, new world auction records were established. A pair of monumental vases commissioned to Jean Dunand by the organizers of the Paris Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in 1925 became the most expensive works by the craftsman at €3.1 million ($4 million). A side table (console, in French), with a black marble top supported by three silvered bronze cobras exhibited in the 1925 show by its maker Albert Cheuret, raised the auction record for the craftsman to €313,000 ($405,000), and a large woolen rug with a complex geometrical design inspired by pre-Columbian stone architecture from Mexico designed in the late 1920s by the famous Brazilian-born Art Deco artist Ivan da Silva Bruhns climbed to €229,000 ($296,303).

But all this is dwarfed by the €21.9 million ($28.34 million) paid for an armchair designed by Eileen Gray around 1917-19, which Christie’s had estimated to be worth €2 million to €3 million ($2.6-3.9 million), plus the sale charge. The curving arms in lacquered wood terminated with dragon heads give it a half-Symbolist, half-Surrealist touch, which does not stop it from coming close to kitsch. The new record for Gray multiplies sixfold the previous record for the Irish-born designer.

Analysts will endlessly debate the causes that account for this unique buying spree and the price explosion that it triggered in the midst of a world recession.

It is true that the names of the late Saint Laurent and of Bergé, who consigned the collection, helped generate huge cost-free publicity. However, you don’t get hundreds of art buyers to spend close to half a billion dollars for celebrity’s sake. My hunch is that the decisive factor was the feeling that the long-gone age of abundance, when works genuinely collected kept coming back to the market after a prolonged absence, had miraculously returned for a few days. For a short while, the natural market ecology of yore seemed to have been restored. The more fundamental factor, however, is the awareness that the supplies of art from the past are inexorably drying up even as interest in art and collecting exponentially grows. This means that as long as works keep turning up, there will be some who will be yearning for them and therefore be reluctant to pass on opportunities that they may not see again.

Collecting is a passion, some would say an addiction, or sometimes just a game. And no one so far has found a way of deterring addicts and gamblers from their obsessive pursuit.

Souren Melikian is the international editor of Art+Auction.

"Beyond Celebrity" 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.