The coverage of Sotheby’s $375m Contemporary art sale repeats a familiar refrain from the art market’s strength in the credit crisis years. It’s supposedly all cash looking for a safe haven in high-quality art. This season Abstract Expressionist works take over from Pop Art classics as the definition of quality. Rothko, Pollock, de Kooning, Still & Kline made up half of the top ten works. The Kohl collection of Abstract Expressionist art contributed $101m to the sale total and the Rothko another $75m.
Taken together, the top ten works (which include other Contemporary blue chip names like Warhol, Richter and Bacon) accounted for two-thirds of the auction’s record setting total. The top of the Contemporary market may continue to be strong—and collectors may indeed be parking money in reliable art—but the broader base of the market struggled last night.
Had it not been for Sotheby’s adroit handling of the sale which included scrambling to lower reserves (Tobias Meyer was masterful in his use of the threat that he would sell a lot well below the low estimate by drily commenting, ‘I can sell it’) and, in one case, re-opening a bought in lot to achieve the minimum price on a Basquiat (well below the low estimate) the sale would have been a casualty strewn debacle on the lower end.
Carol Vogel quotes her favorite source on exactly that strategy. (You’ll have to read between the lines to hear him say it.) Because with the exception of an Yves Klein ANT painting that did a runner on the estimates, the early lots in the sale that established the crucial momentum that teed up the bidders on the Pollock and Rothko were the very lots Sotheby’s managed so well:
“It was surprising,” Mr. Ségalot said. “But Sotheby’s had works that were fresh to the market and they put them in the beginning of the sale. That set the tone for the rest of the evening.”
That didn’t stop some market pros from suggesting that the auction winners were less than seasoned collectors:
“There were huge prices,” Allan Schwartzman, a Manhattan art adviser, said toward the end of the sale. “It was all about fast money looking for places to park.”
Interestingly, the old salts of the art world were very active in the market’s shallows last night. The Warhol works on paper and disaster paintings that stirred up a tempest of bidding were fought over by the market’s most acute participants, EykynMaclean, Philippe Ségalot, Peter Brant. Judd Tully chased Brant down after the sale:
Buttonholed outside the salesroom, Brant observed, “There was a lot of work by Warhol offered tonight and there seems to be great demand for it.” Asked about the price he paid for the phthalo green disaster painting, which features the driver of the smashed convertible hanging horribly outside the passenger side, Brant said, “I didn’t think that was too expensive either.”
(Ironically, another early Warhol, “Troy,” featuring the serial visage of one-time tv/movie star Troy Donahue, from 1962, was withdrawn before the sale, apparently the victim of sparse market interest [est. $15-20 million].)
Other abstract painters were getting attention from established market players last night too. Many of the sales that were at or below the estimate range still represented strong gains over time. Consignors may have simply pushed the auction house’s too hard this season. Tully reminds us what below estimate sale can really mean in terms of relatively short-term gain:
Joan Mitchell’s “Untitled” abstraction from 1961 seemed downright cheap at $5,122,500 (est. $4.5-6 million), selling to New York dealer Lucy Mitchell-Innes of Mitchell-Innes & Nash. It last sold at auction at Christie’s New York in November 2004 for $903,500.
Bloomberg’s Katya Kazakina found a few witnesses willing to testify to the depth of collector interest, even if that interest is sober and selective:
“You don’t get new records unless you have things that are perceived to be of the highest quality and are fresh to the market,” said Frances Beatty, vice president of Richard L. Feigen & Co., a New York gallery. “In the contemporary market, there’s a pretty deep list of collectors who want to reach for trophy pictures.”
“It’s all about the quality,” said Leonard Riggio, the founder of Barnes & Noble Inc. (BKS)
Dan Duray got at that point (and the aggressive estimates) with these observations from last night’s sale:
Such stars made up for later lots, which saw modest bidding and sold to an emptier room, one that had been exhausted by an auction that took one hour to reach lot 26. There was a marked drop-off in action after lot 40, and in this latter block of 29 lots, nine (out of an auction total of 11) failed to sell and 13 (out of a total of 20) went for below-estimate prices. […]
“Well, we tried,” Mr. Meyer said, as a work by Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat passed at $2.1 million. And did they ever! The work had sold for only $400,000 when it last came up at auction, at Sotheby’s New York, in 2004.
Finally, Kelly Crow got some geographical intelligence from the market makers themselves. With the exception of the tantalizing reference to Malaysia (was that one big buyer or more than one Malay collector?) the list contains more established regions and notably lacks mention of the Gulf States or Russia and it’s Central Asian republics:
After the sale, Sotheby’s specialist Anthony Grant said a majority of the night’s buyers hailed from places like the United States, Malaysia, France, Switzerland and South America where collectors are still scouring for hard-asset areas to store their cash. Mr. Grant said Russian collectors didn’t participate much this time around, though.