This week has shown that there’s still a lot of money sloshing around London’s art market; Christie’s three-pronged 21st/20th century evening sale on Thursday took £197.5 million ($265 million), one day after Sotheby’s modern and contemporary auction brought £131 million ($175 million).
The result marked a 52 percent increase on the house’s equivalent sale last year, achieving a 96 percen sell-through rate by lot and 98 percent by value. There were also new artist records set for Henry Moore, Toyen, and Dorothea Tanning. Four works by Cecily Brown, Bridget Riley, Lucian Freud, and Frank Auerbach were withdrawn before kick-off, and carried a collective high estimate of nearly £17 million.
Christie’s sales–21st/20th century, “The Art of the Surreal,” and “Modern Visionaries – The Roger and Josette Vanthournout Collection” (in that order)—felt like a slog at times, with 90 odd lots sold in nearly four hours. But both houses’ results countered the recent narrative that London’s status as a cultural powerhouse was on the slide. Rich people are still spending big here, despite the Labour government scrapping the UK’s non-domicile status last April, meaning all British residents now need to pay tax on income, no matter where they earned it. Several top dealers and advisors told ARTnews last year that they were worried the move would push more collectors to take their art-buying elsewhere. Concerns that ongoing war between the US, Israel, and Iran would stem bidding were also put to rest, at least for the top lots, which sold well.
Lot 7, Henry Moore’s King and Queen bronze, sailed past its £15 million high estimate to sell for £26.3 million ($35.2 million), the artist’s new auction record. At one point, the thronging crowd gasped as the bidding leapt from £20.5 million to £22 million. Before the sale, Katherine Arnold, Christie’s vice chairman of 20th/21st century art and head of post-war and contemporary art for Europe, described the work as “the most exciting sculpture I’ve ever seen brought to market.”
Over WhatsApp, Phillip Hoffman, founder of The Fine Art Group, messaged me his takeaway from the front row: “As we see with the Moore, quality and rare does extremely well in this market.” King and Queen bronze is the last cast from the series still in private hands.
Auctioneer Adrien Meyer, Christie’s global head of private sales, impressionist and modern art, was doing his best to rouse bidders from the house’s new rostrum early on. When Lot 8 came up—Gerhard Richter’s Abstraktes Bild—he refused an increment of £100,000 that would have taken the price to £6.1 million. “We’ve got 90 more lots to get through tonight, you’ll need to do better than that,” he said. It eventually sold for £7.6 million ($10.1 million).
Lot 11, Wassily Kandinsky’s Le Rond Rouge, which had a £15.5 million high estimate, or about $21.3 million, ended up selling within estimate for £12.5 million ($16.8 million). Eduardo Chillida’s Modulación del espacio III sold for £3.3 million (high estimate: (£1.2 million), Rose Wylie’s Tube Girl fetched £152,400 (high estimate: £70,000), coinciding with her major solo exhibition at The Royal Academy. The 20th/21st part of the sale totalled £114 million.
The 25th edition of “The Art of the Surreal” achieved 100 percent sell-through by lot and value, totaling £43 million ($57.4 million) The sale also set two world auction records: Dorothea Tanning’s Children’s Games made £4.7 million($6.2 million), and Toyen’s Le devenir de la liberté fetched £3.7 million ($4.9 million). René Magritte’s Les grâces naturelles also went for £8.5 million ($11.4 million).
Finally, “Modern Visionaries – The Roger and Josette Vanthournout Collection” realized a total of £40.3 million ($53.9 million), with sell-through rates of 97 percent by lot and 94 percent by value. The highlight of the auction was Pablo Picasso’s Nu Debout et Femmes Assises, which fetched £7 million ($9.3 million).
Despite Christie’s taking £131 million for the evening, Jussi Pylkkänen, Christie’s former global president and founder of Art Pylkkänen, told me in the foyer after the sale that we remain in a “soft market.” “The estimates tonight were generally too high, which means less people were bidding on them,” he said, “And when there’s only one or two bids on a work, it often doesn’t represent their true value.”
Olivier Camu, Christie’s deputy chairman, impressionist and modern art, said that the evening’s results were “a powerful tribute to Roger and Josette Vanthournout ’s 60-year-long passion for discovering and collecting.”
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Milan-based advisor Mattia Pozzoni left the night bullish on London. “This week had the feeling of London reclaiming its place on the market map,” he said. “Between the auctions and the buzz around Tracey Emin’s show at the Tate, it almost felt like going back a few years when collectors came to London expecting to see important works and were ready to spend serious money on them.”
