ART ATTACK

Buyers lap up paintings worth $1.1 billion as most avenues of investment dry up. Scott Reyburn reports

LONDON AUCTION houses sold a record £558.8 million ($1.1 billion) of art including fees over two weeks, with buyers coming into the market seeking to make money as other investments stalled. The total, calculated by Bloomberg from auction house results, is the highest for Impressionist and contemporary sales in London, beating the £521.1 million in February. “There’s no confidence in stock markets at the moment,” said London dealer Alan Hobart, of Pyms Gallery. “People have realised there’s money to be made out of art.”
The auction houses’ day sales of ‘affordable items’ under £500,000 showed constant demand. A week ago, analysts said that the global economic slowdown and credit crunch may reduce sales for priced at less than $1 million, while billionaires such as Russia’s Roman Abramovich will continue to buy trophies. The high point of the series was the £40.9 million with fees paid on June 24 at Christie’s International for Claude Monet’s 1919 water-lily painting, ‘Le Bassin aux Nympheas’. The price, twice the midestimate, bid in the room by the Londonbased art adviser Tania Buckrell Pos, was the highest paid for an Impressionist work of art in Europe, said Christie’s. When contacted by telephone, Buckrell Pos said she could not make any comment about the nationality of her client. “But there’s no doubt that people are now treating art as an alternative asset class,” she said.
SALE TOTALS: For the first time, Christie’s and Sotheby’s held Impressionist and contemporary auctions in successive weeks. Their contemporary sales, combined with Phillips de Pury, fetched £260.9 million. February’s sales were £250.1 million. The pursuit of ‘passion investments’ by the world’s richest individuals remains undeterred by economic volatility, said the World Wealth Report, published last month by Merrill Lynch and Capgemini.
Worldwide, high net worth individuals spent 15.9%, the highest proportion, of their ‘Investment-of-Passion’ dollars on fine art, said the report. The European wealthy are the most avid consumers, spending 22% of these dollars on art, it said. On July 3, Sotheby’s 329-lot day sale of contemporary art made £26.8 million with fees, against an estimate of £19.8 million to £28 million. Eighty-three percent of the lots found buyers.
KEEPING UP: “Many new buyers are coming into the market,” London dealer Michael Hue-Williams said. “It’s a ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ thing. They see contemporary art at a friend’s place, then they want to own some. The easiest thing to do is go along to an auction house.” His Albion Gallery represents international contemporary artists.
“The doom mongers are wrong,’’ said London-based dealer Kenny Schachter. “Contemporary art’s where the action is. It’s become a commodity market like oil or copper.” Sellers were making profits from works by emerging market favourites bought in the past three years. In May, the Pakistani-born Rashid Rana topped the ‘Indian Contemporary Art Market Confidence Ranking’ by London-based research company ArtTactic.
Rana’s ’07 work, ‘Veil #6’ — an image of five women in burqas, made of thousands of tiny pornographic photos — sold at Sotheby’s to a telephone buyer for £325,250 with fees. The 5-foot, 10-inch-wide photomontage, with a lower estimate of £60,000, was from an edition of five. “The current gallery price for this type of Rana is about $60,000,” Conor Macklin, director of London’s Grosvenor Gallery said. The gallery, which specialises in Indian art, held a ’05 exhibition of works by Indian contemporary painter TV Santhosh, who is second in ArtTactic’s Indian art confidence rankings.
Santhosh’s 6-foot-wide canvas, ‘Man Made Famine and the Rats’, was bought at the show for $15,000, said Macklin. At Sotheby’s it sold for a twice-estimate £121,250 with fees. “The international appeal of these artists is making them fetch high prices,” said Macklin.
James Sevier, specialist in charge of Sotheby’s auction, said that more than half the lots had sold to European private buyers in his day sale. “A lot of them buy at our evening sales and so aren’t the sort of people who are affected by economic downturns,” he said. Christie’s and Phillips experienced more mixed demand at their contemporary day sales.
NEW SALEROOM: On June 30, Phillips only managed to sell 57% of the 391 lots it was offering at its new saleroom in a former mail sorting office in Victoria. The auction, with many young Western and Chinese artists, totalled £6.3 million against a low estimate of £11.2 million.
When contacted by telephone, no senior specialist at Phillips de Pury was available for interview. “It’s all about presentation, marketing and getting the estimates right,” said London dealer Gerard Faggionato, who represents the Francis Bacon Estate. “Sotheby’s were also selling more classic material.”
The following day, Christie’s raised £22.4 million with fees from 337 contemporary lots, 67% of which found buyers. The pre-sale estimate was £22.8 million to £32.2 million. “Christie’s had good material,” said Schachter. “The estimates were just too high. The market’s in good health, but if you get too aggressive with prices it can be fickle.”