Navigating a Shrinking Art Market

Tamara de Lempicka Joan Miro Oskar Kokoschka Edgar Degas Claude Monet Fra Bartolommeo Francois Boucher Hendrick Terbrugghen

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To the outside world, the most visible consequence of the tsunami that swept across the art market is the dramatic fall in auction turnover numbers during the first half of 2009.

At Christie’s total sales as of June 30 stood at $1.8 billion, a 35 percent drop from the corresponding period of 2008. At Sotheby’s the plunge looked abysmal. With sales of only $995 million, the total was down by 64 percent. True, as a highly placed staff member privately pointed out to me, the Christie’s result would have been considerably less bright had it not been for the phenomenal one-off Yves Saint Laurent-Pierre Bergé February auction in Paris, which by the end of the third day boasted a cool €374 million, more than half a billion dollars. But that total makes the overall auction market performance look bleaker still.

The real matter of concern, however, does not lie in the global numbers but in the reason underlying them. Contrary to what both end-of-season reports suggest, this is not because the financial storm of autumn 2008 put the auction market into crisis mode like the rest of the economy. Quite the contrary. It remained strikingly bullish. The drop in overall sales reflects not a reluctance to buy art, but to consign it to auction.

Evidence of the buyers’ keenness came forth even in the January New York sales of Old Masters, at a time when the gloom was at its darkest. A dip in the success rate reflected the paucity of desirable goods, but where there was cause to compete, bidders were enthusiastic. At Sotheby’s an admirable portrait of a bagpipe player by Hendrick Ter Brugghen realized a record $10,162,500. Another enormous price in its own right was the $1,314,500 paid for François Boucher’s The Muse Erato, done in the most conventional Louis XV style, long out of favor. The performance of the Boucher, which sold for nearly two and a half times the estimate, underlined the eagerness to acquire typical works by well-known artists.

A few days later in London, the auctions of Impressionist and modern masters, unimpressive as they were, demonstrated that buyers were, more than ever, ready to jump at anything remotely plausible in this category. On February 3, there were only 30 lots at Sotheby’s, and the star piece was a statue that had not even been physically made by the artist to whose name it was credited. This was one of several bronze casts reproducing a wax model executed by Degas in 1879-1881. The Petite danseuse de quatorze ans, as it is now known, was cast sometime between 1922 and 1937, long after the artist’s death in 1917.

It is authentic in legal terms because the casts were commissioned by the artist’s heirs, who hold the copyright. But the trimming and the patination, both of which are essential in determining the final appearance of the bronze after it is taken out of its mold, were not controlled by the artist. This did not stop the Petite danseuse from becoming the most expensive three-dimensional work associated with the artist’s name ever auctioned. It climbed to an astonishing £13 million ($19 million).

There were other unexpectedly high prices. Istanbul I, painted by the Austrian Oskar Kokoschka in June 1929, realized £1.5 million ($2.1 million ), even though the sketchy manner and seething detail results in a confused composition.

Yet these were no freakish occurrences. In March the European Fine Art Fair in Maastricht was in overall terms a huge success. Old Masters fared brilliantly. Johnny Van Haeften, of London, the European leader in Dutch and Flemish masters, did as well as in 2008. Some dealers with a less extensive stock, like Raphael Valls, of London, had their best fair ever. Even more telling, the story was the same in some other areas at an incomparably more modest financial level. Ben Janssens, of London, whose main focus is Chinese art with sidelines in Japanese and Indian art, also did better than ever before at Maastricht.

From May to July the auction market soared from strength to strength, within the limitations of its offerings. The astonishing case of two portraits by Tamara de Lempicka, a café society artist of the Art Deco age, offered the ultimate symbol of the feverish search for works with signatures that ring a bell. Sold in the context of the Impressionist and modern art sales in New York, the picture, which came close to kitsch, would have run into difficulties in earlier times. Instead, on May 5 at Sotheby’s the 1932 Portrait de Marjorie Ferry realized a record $4.9 million. More amazing still, that record was beaten a day later when Christie’s sold her 1932 Portrait de Mme M. for $6.1 million.