Hot List 2024, Emerging Artists
Sotheby's releases 2023 results + What do average prices really tell us? + Old Master Highlights + Has the historical turn already begun at the lower reaches of the market?
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In This Issue
Old Masters Highlights: New York Old Masters Week opens with Quentin Collection making $12.9 million; Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, van Dyck and Rubens star in sales
Sotheby’s Results: Riding a wave of luxury sales, Sotheby’s sees an almost imperceptible drop in 2023
Rybolovlev Trial Update: The jury gets the case.
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What do average prices and lot counts really tell us? There’s been a noticeable drop in the number of lots offered at the three big auction houses. What’s driving this trend?
Hot List 2024, Emerging Artists: Has the turn toward historical artists already begun?
New Lives for Old Masters
Christie’s opened the January Old Masters sales in New York with the sale of 15 bronzes from the Quentin Collection assembled by Argentine connoisseur Claudia Quentin. These works have been exhibited in museums like the Frick and the Met but the highly specialized market for bronzes—architect and tastemaker Peter Marino keeps some of his best examples in his bathroom so he spends quality time with them—can end up creating volatile markets. The Quentin Collection sale was a good example with the top lot, a Giambologna cast of the god Mars, passing after only getting bids to $5 million against a $7 million estimate. That doesn’t mean there’s no appetite for these works. The top lot was another Giambologna of a Sleeping Nymph that was estimated at $800,000 and ended up selling for $5.9 million with fees. The other surprise was a work attributed to Maso Finiguerra depicting Hercules and Antaeus wrestling. It had a $600,000 estimate but made $2.47 million with fees. In the end, only 10 of the 15 bronzes offered found buyers for a total of $12.9 million. But those kinds of sell-through rates are much more common in the Old Masters world.
Tomorrow, Christie’s will offer paintings by Michele Marieschi, Jean-Honoré Fragonard and Giandomenico Tiepolo; and on Thursday a very small but stunning drawing by Antony van Dyck.
Also tomorrow, Sotheby’s will hold a single-owner sale entitled A Scholar Collects with a dozen works by French court painter Elizabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun among the 38 lots offered. That’s the largest sale of Vigée Le Brun’s work. The top lot is a self portrait in traveling costume (est. $700,000) by Vigée Le Brun.
The selfie theme is continued in the Old Masters sale where self portraits by Anthony van Dyck (est. $2 million) and his master Peter Paul Rubens (est. $3 million) are also featured lots. Meanwhile, Sotheby’s is highlighting a portrait by Scipione Pulzone, a Roman artist of the 16th Century, as the cover lot of the sale despite the modest $200,000 estimate.
Sotheby’s 2023 Total Sales = $7.9 Billion
Sotheby’s announced this week that it had total sales of $7.9 billion which was slightly below the very strong results for 2023. The central theme of the results is the potent luxury market which accounts for $2.2 billion in sales at Sotheby’s, twice the sales volume at their crosstown rivals Christie’s. Sotheby’s has sales from a classic car and a real estate division but the company has not broken out those categories so we cannot see whether the difference between the two houses in both luxury and overall sales comes down to having those additional categories and a larger finance division in Sotheby’s Financial Service. On the face of it, the two companies seem to be running neck and neck in comparable categories. Sotheby’s also saw a rise in private sales from 2022 to 2023 which generally tracks during years when the overall auction market contracts.
Rybolovlev Trial Update
The jury now has the case. Judge Jesse Furman has winnowed the claims down to exclude the Modigliani carved head and the insurance valuation on the Leonardo. So the three issues the jury must find fact upon are whether Bouvier defrauded Rybolovlev in the sales of the Klimt, the Magritte and the Leonardo. From the evidence shown and Sotheby’s stipulation, that won’t be hard. But Bouvier isn’t a party to this claim. So after deciding if there was fraud, the jury must decide if Sotheby’s helped Bouvier defraud Rybolovlev. The plaintiffs produced almost no evidence that Sotheby’s knew Bouvier was defrauding Rybolovlev. But if the jury does find “clear and convincing evidence” that Sotheby’s knew about the fraud and helped Bouvier commit that fraud, then the jurors will decide the level of damages.
We’ve been holding this newsletter waiting for a decision. But that doesn’t seem like it will come in time. We will post updates on our Instagram page after the decision is announced and have a more detailed discussion of the deicision on Friday.
What do average prices and lot counts really tell us?
Christine Bourron’s Pi-Ex continues to fill the down time with some interesting charts from the past 17 years of auction house data. Pi-Ex published these two charts on LinkedIn in reverse order. But we think they explain themselves a little better if we start with the most recent chart of the number of lots offered and sold then go to the chart of average prices against number of lots sold. You’ll see from the chart that the number of lots offered and sold plummeted in the global financial crisis in 2009. The number of lots offered and sold recovered for the next six years but dropped again in 2016. Even with temporary rises, the number lots offered at auction remain below 2009.
What conclusions should we draw from that? Bourron suggests softening prices bring fewer lots to market. But that’s mostly based upon 2016 and 2020.
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