Much was made of the auctions being a huge success for London last week, with Sotheby’s total sale results realising over £420 million, including the highest figure achieved for a London single owner sale: £306 million. Christie’s chose to hold their main auction season in October to tie in with the Frieze Week bonanza. As has been well documented online over the last week, the prices achieved were exceptional, and the feeling in the room was one of excitement bordering on hysteria at the prospect of a strong London sales series, thanks largely to the vast collection of Joe and Viv Lewis.
However, the fact remains that London is still in danger of lagging behind the other major art market centres. In my view, New York continues to hold the strongest position, with Paris catching up fast. Lewis’s extraordinary collection of sensational works, centred around a remarkable Freud painting, could have been sold in Timbuktu and elicited the same response from bidders. Great works of art sell well anywhere. My question would be: if these works had been sold in New York, would the results have been even more impressive?
At Sotheby’s, the Lewis Collection really shone through as the finest collection to come to market in Europe in a generation, and it was certainly the most valuable. Magritte continues to surprise us all, with the result of the bowler hatted subject in La Belle Promenade. The gouache proved all too magnetic to bidders, fetching £16 million. Yes, £16 million including premium for a gouache, and that is not a typo. That is the same as an Empire of Light oil painting just a few years ago and proves the astonishing rise in his profile and the desire for truly signature works.
Freud’s large scale work, Sleeping by the Lion Carpet, depicting the striking figure of Sue Tilley, achieved a tremendous price (£29.3 million) and was purportedly bought by the Citadel founder and art collecting giant, Ken Griffin. It was, for me, the highlight of the sale and my favourite oil painting on view at the recent National Portrait Gallery show too. It was Lewis, through his wonderful relationship with Bill Acquavella, who helped to underpin the mid 1990s market for Freud at a time when large scale canvases were not his most popular. I recall visiting a show at Tate Britain in 2002 where the later works were dominant and, in their multitudes, somewhat overbearing. However, this work was hanging amongst works by the Modern Masters and still held its own. I had hoped this result might rival the Paul Allen Family Group Freud painting sold a few years ago at Christie’s New York. That work achieved nearly $90 million, though it was certainly easier to place, and folds of flesh are not to every collector’s taste.
As a figurative collection, the variety on offer was extraordinary. Schiele’s Danaë was my favourite of the early twentieth century paintings and, although the Modigliani dominated financially, the Schiele embodied everything one could want from a Viennese painting of that period: an elegant nude curled in sleep, with subtle traces of Art Nouveau in the flowing curves of hair and grass. It was on the market privately ten years ago for $30 million, but this sale still brought a healthy £18 million.
Picasso’s market was a major winner this season, and I knew that the 1938 work on paper would attract intense competition. What a fabulous example of his Dora Maar series. The matte surface of the paper, devoid of gloss, made it especially inviting. Personally, I felt the price was a touch too full, but there is clearly strong appetite among bidders for any A+ pictures from the 1930s. Julian Dawes was on the phone, which makes it probable that the buyer was an American collector. Despite the decent price for the Modigliani nude, once considered the high point of any Modern Art collection, I was a little underwhelmed by the final result in relation to the staggering price fetched back in 2015 for Nu couché ($170 million). Tastes are changing even in the eleven years since that price was achieved.
The two results, or lack thereof, that might have surprised the market were Claude Monet’s Sketch of Camille on the Beach (1870) and Peter Doig’s Cabin Essence, which was withdrawn prior to being offered. Early Monet can be tricky given the generic style of many of the Impressionists around the late 1860s and early 1870s, and the pricing was too aggressive.
The post mortem of every sale season is the gossip surrounding the results. I was delighted to see my pal Simon Stock on the phone and bidding furiously. His Asian collectors have deep pockets and a real taste for striking figurative art by the greats, with over one third of the sale going to Asia by value. Patti Wong, the previous Sotheby’s rainmaker extraordinaire and major Asian adviser, had a good season by all accounts, and I saw her colleague Daryl Mitchell bidding strongly too.
Throughout the Sotheby’s day sales we saw some vast prices for works that, in any other series, would have been evening sale quality. A delightfully worked monochrome picture of Dora Maar made £1.3 million all inclusive and the early Monet painting from his caricature era made $1.3 million too. The market is deep and looks very secure for Impressionist and Modern collectors and dealers.
Christie’s season was more measured than Sotheby’s record breaking week but produced solid results. The centrepiece was Beyond Ordinary – Then. Now. Next. Works from the Zabludowicz Collection, which realised £15.45 million against a pre sale estimate of around £15 million. The sale achieved an 89% sell through rate by lot and 97% by value, indicating generally disciplined pricing and broad buyer participation. Philip Guston’s Mirror Head led the auction at £3.9 million, while 12 works exceeded their high estimates. Christie’s London sales on 25 June totalled approximately £25.7 million, reflecting a stable market rather than the aggressive bidding seen at Sotheby’s.
Overall, as ever, please do use an adviser when spending significant sums on works of art. The pitfalls of buying at auction are numerous and those paintings that oversold this season might prove tricky to sell for the same sum further down the line. Have a great summer and do get in touch.