Colin Gleadell on Old Master sales
Some of the most volatile swings on record in stock markets across the world coincided with the first significant art auctions of the year in London and New York last week.
On Monday, the FTSE 100 fell by 5.5 per cent, the biggest drop since September 11, 2001. This, together with the ongoing effects of the credit crunch and a housing slump in the US, where the economy is teetering on the edge of recession, might easily have had a disastrous impact on the sales. Certainly Sotheby's, the only publicly quoted auction house, saw its share value slip to its lowest level for 16 months on Wednesday due to fears that art prices would suffer. But there were no signs of any serious immediate impact. A sale of 19th-century European art at Christie's in London fell just short of its pre-sale estimate to realise £2.68 million, but the total was comparable to what these seasonal sales have achieved over the past five years. A much bigger test was faced by the Old Master sales in New York. First off were the drawings - a connoisseurs' market if ever there was one - in which Sotheby's was offering more than 100 Italian drawings from the collection of Jeffrey E Horvitz, an American investor who has been collecting Old Master drawings since 1983. |
Horvitz had decided to sell his Italian drawings to concentrate on French works, which are more plentiful on the market. According to Sotheby's expert Gregory Rubinstein, the number of Italian drawings offered was "quite a lot for the market to absorb at one time". But the $5 million (£2.5 million) sale still achieved several record prices.
A drawing of St Jerome in his Study by Agostino Carracci, bought in 1993 for $43,000, tripled estimates to fetch a record $385,000 from an American collector. Briseis Leaving Achilles's Tent, a pen-and-ink drawing depicting a scene from the Iliad by the Roman neo-classical artist Giuseppe Cades, had been bought in 1998 for $57,500 and doubled estimates to sell for a record $253,000 to an American museum.
In two further drawings sales held by Sotheby's and Christie's, nearly three quarters of the works offered were sold, with several more record prices established. The connoisseurs were clearly not perturbed by events on Wall Street.
The next day, the stakes rose for a sale of Old Master paintings and works of art at Sotheby's that was expected to bring at least $68 million. But that, too, passed the test, fetching $77.7 million.
Here the problem was less the state of the economy than the number of works that had only recently been sold at auction. One American collector offered dozens of paintings which had been bought in the '90s, many of which did not sell. There were no bids, even at $1.5 million, for instance, for a landscape by Claude Lorrain, bought in 1999 for $2 million.
The collector was luckier, however, when it came to Lucas Cranach, whose decorative, mannerist paintings strike a chord with collectors today. Cranach's lively depiction of the legend of how the young Phyllis humiliated the ageing Aristotle, for which the collector had paid £1.5 million ($2.2 million) in 2001, sold to London dealer Konrad Bernheimer for $4 million.
Another Cranach, a three-quarter-length portrait of an alluring young woman holding fruit, doubled estimates to sell for $5 million - the second-highest price on record for the artist.
Also weathering the storm in the financial markets were fashionable view paintings. A Venetian view by Bernardo Bellotto and a view of the Thames by Canaletto - both from the collection of oil scion Gordon Getty, and neither considered first-rate - doubled estimates to sell for $2 million each.
And then there were the rarities. A fine 15th-century Gothic limewood carving of St Catherine by the German artist Tilman Riemenschneider was only the second example of his work ever to appear at auction, and it made the top price selling for $6.3 million. It was closely followed by a painted terracotta relief of the Virgin and Child by Donatello, the only example in private hands in the US, which sold for $5.6 million. Both were auction records.
All in all, dealers agreed that these were strong results considering the turmoil in the financial markets. Twice in the past 30 years, in 1987 and 2001, the art market has shrugged off dramatic falls in the stock market. But, if the economy is heading for the kind of recession witnessed in 1929 or 1990, then it will be a different story.
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