The incredible shrinking saleroom

The incredible shrinking saleroom (Dec 24th 2008)
The high end Art Market, the auction houses and the end of the bubble.

It is about time to check for the Art Market Outlook for 2009, the best available information is to find on the Internet and from Art Magazines, Auction Houses like Christie's and Sotheby's and from resources elsewhere in the Art World. However, the Art Market is keeping up appearances and a clearer picture will emerge in the next three months.
The financial industry and banks have through the years usually been very generous with grants and gifts to museuns and the Arts in general, and due to the crisis a lot of those grants have been reduced or ended.
In the middle part of the market, Artists, dealers and galleries are beginning to feel the pinch of a shrinking market.
But first we will explore the top of the market.

A different version of this article research can be found at our stock market blog:
Blog: Beurskrach 2008 - Stock Market Crash, recession and the World Economy
Post: The high end Art Market, the auction houses and the end of the bubble.
Link: http://beurskrach.blogspot.com/2009/01/high-end-art-market-auction-houses-and.html


With more than 200.000 lay-offs in Wall Street alone and many more in London and other financial districts around the world, stock markets off between 35 % and 55% globally, property prices like in East Hampton fallen by over 35%, and the gobal recession taking shape, the high end Art Market can be expected to take a heavy hit.

(from The Economist) Neither of the main houses wants to be the first to announce job losses or cancelled sales, but there will be cuts. With smaller auctions comes the opportunity to reduce variable costs such as catalogues and marketing, where there is still a lot of fat.

If there is one lesson to be learned from the autumn it is that there is still an art market, and you can’t say that anymore about all markets. Demand is there for works of exceptional quality. The challenge will be to persuade sellers who don’t need to sell to continue consigning their very best works.

Just how difficult this will be can be seen from the fact that when asked about the coming sales, both houses ignore the Old-Master sales that will be held in New York at the end of January and focus instead on the Impressionist and modern sales the following month. Sotheby’s, for example, has separated a husband-and-wife pair of portraits by Frans Hals in the hope that they will make more apart than together. “The Portrait of a Man Holding Gloves” is estimated at $8m-12m whereas his much plainer consort, shown in “The Portrait of a Woman Holding a Handkerchief” has been set at $7m-9m. The pictures have been consigned by a New York collector and were recently shown in London as part of a marketing tour. Despite that, both pictures are being talked about by dealers and collectors as “not great Frans Hals”.

The outlook for February is brighter. Christie’s has six works from an important European collection. The consignment, which includes works by Henri de Toulouse Lautrec, Paul Gauguin, Pierre Bonnard and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, is led by a painting by Claude Monet. “Dans la Prairie”, which dates from 1876, was exhibited at the seminal third Impressionist exhibition in Paris in 1877 in Paris. It was painted in Argenteuil, where Monet lived between 1871 and 1878, depicts the artist’s wife, Camille, reclined and reading amongst blooming flowers in an open meadow. It is expected to sell for around £15m. Sotheby’s has a rare work by Amadeo Modigliani dating back to 1913, which has been consigned by a British collector and which has not been seen at auction for nearly 30 years. Part of the “Caryatid” series on which Modigliani worked frequently in drawings, this version in oil has a highly sculptural feel.
The estimate has been set at £6m-8m.

But the sale that is generating the most excitement is the three-day auction of paintings, furniture, clothes and sculpture belonging to Yves Saint Laurent and his partner, Pierre Bergé. Like the Damien Hirst sale, it will be a party. Christie’s is hoping it will be a bash. Sotheby’s, its rival, is also hoping the sale goes well, for if it does it will mean that perhaps things aren’t quite so bad as they seem.
Sotheby’s Impressionist and Modern sale is in London on February 3rd 2009. Christie’s sale is on February 4th. The three sessions of Yves Saint Laurent/Pierre Bergé collection begin in Paris in February 23rd.