What Happened in New York, March 2024
According to LiveArt's data, the New York mid-season sales fell by 45% year over years: Is that the bottom? Or will the Spring be equally tough? + Indian Moderns rage!
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In This Issue
Results: Raza in Antibes; Raza in New York; Sotheby’s South Asian Modern & Contemporary = $19m
What Happened in New York, March 2024: The mid-season sales saw the previous market trends come up short. Is this a final washout of the pandemic market? Will momentum build around new artists?
Results
Métayer Mermoz sale of S.H. Raza painting for €4.75 million
On Sunday, Indian Progressive painter S.H Raza’s Paysage Agrieste from 1961 was sold at Métayer Mermoz auction house in Antibes. The work was offered with a €400,000 estimate. Raza spent a substantial portion of his career painting in France having moved there in 1950. He eventually married a French artist. The six-foot wide work made at the height of Raza’s early abstract work was bought for €4.75 million ($5.18M.) The work was bought in 1965 and has been in the South of France ever since but the Raza Foundation was able to find evidence of its authenticity in the archives of Raza’s Paris gallery Lara Vincy which means the painting will be included in Raza’s catalogue raisonné. According to auctioneer Guillaume Mermoz, the buyer’s are in India where the work will be returning. Like Zao Wou-ki, whose working life was spent in France, there seems to be a growing interest in repatriating Raza’s work to South Asia.
SH Raza’s Busy Week
The next day, Sotheby’s held its Modern & Contemporary South Asian Art sale in New York where the top lot by estimate and by premium price was S.H. Raza’s Kallisté from 1959. Similar in palette and style to Paysage Agrieste, the painting was bid to more than twice the estimate making a final price of $5.6 million with fees. The stretcher has stamps from Raza’s gallery in Paris Lara Vincy as well as Lanyon Gallery in Palo Alto where Raza exhibited while teaching at Berkeley in 1962. The California collectors who consigned the painting have owned it for 60 years.
Sotheby’s South Asian Results
South Asian Modern art has been on a tear for the better part of a year. The category seems to be riding high on the booming Indian economy and the support of some of India's richest families like the Ambanis. (Yes, the ones with the big pre-wedding party where Rihanna performed earlier this month.) Sotheby’s held two sales yesterday in the category. The first was a single-owner collection from Virginia and Ravi Akhoury—a retired investment executive who trained at SUNY Stonybrook when famed investor James Simons taught there—estimated at $1.2 million that sold for more than twice the estimates to total $3,462,655. The various-owners sale had $6.7 million in estimated value but sold for almost twice that to make $16.3 million with fees. According to LiveArt’s data, 72% of the lots offered were sold for more than the estimates, a clear sign of market that is advancing rapidly. Sotheby’s toured these objects to India and the effort paid off. Christie’s sale takes place tomorrow and we’ll try to have analysis of LiveArt’s auction data on Friday.
What Happened in New York, March 2024
New York Mid-Season Sales report
The art market, especially the Contemporary market which has been driven by demand for works by artists with emerging markets for several years now, is in the midst of an aggressive shift. Some early indications suggest the market is moving toward historical work from overlooked artists and work at lower price points. But it remains far too early to tell what the broadest market impulse will be.
According to LiveArt’s data, the March mid-season Post War and Contemporary art sales in New York fell from $95.5 million in total for 2023 to $52.6 million in 2024, or 45% by value with nearly the same number of lots offered. It is probably too soon to tell if the market has reached a bottom.
This year, 719 lots were initially offered with an aggregate low estimate of $51.9 million. Before the sale, 19 lots were withdrawn with an aggregate low estimate of just under $4 million. Last year the same figures were 734 lots with an aggregate low estimate of $73 million. Before the sale, four lots were withdrawn with an aggregate low estimate of $585,000.
In 2023, the sell-through rate was 82.5%; this year, it fell to 77%. In 2023, the hammer ratio for these sales was 1.05, not a strong number but much more aggressive than the weak .87 seen in these sales this year. The 2023 edition of these sales had two collections being sold as featured events in the sales cycle; this year, a significant amount of the property was held over from marquee collections sold in 2023 like Emily Fisher Landau, Chara Streyer and Gerald Fineberg.
In a down market there seems to be a fixation on withdrawn lots. The assumption that lots are only withdrawn to protect an auction house’s sale statistics—which seems to predominate among some commentators—is impossible to verify. Last Summer, the London sales saw a large number of lots withdrawn due to a legal dispute. The commentary treated the withdrawn lots as a harbinger of a down market but the London sales were stable within the context of the entire year. In these sales, 19 lots were withdrawn with a $3.995 million estimated value or 8.5% of the total pre-sale estimated value. Thirteen of the 19 lots—and 75% of the value—were at Sotheby’s which did have the highest hammer ratio and sell-through rate among the three houses. (Feel free to drawn your own conclusions from that.) Without the withdrawn lots, the overall hammer ratio for these sales would have dropped from the weak 0.87 posted to an even weaker 0.80.
The fact that more than 40% of the sold lots went for prices that were below the low estimate also supports the idea that the Post War and Contemporary art market has hit a wall. It remains, in the words of one active market participant, “too late to sell.” But it may not be too early to buy considering some of the prices for quality works.
Whether the mix of property is more to blame than overall demand is a question that will have to be answered in the day sales in May and again in September.
The works that were in demand—by Alma Thomas, Jean Dubuffet and Jean-Michel Basquiat—had distinctive back stories. The Basquiat was bought from Larry Gagosian in 1982, the year that the artist moved to Los Angeles and produced work for Gagosian’s gallery. This particular drawing was made before Basquiat relocated but the sale took place a week before Gagosian’s West Coast gallery opened an important show of works made during the period Basquiat was living in California. Alma Thomas’s striking pink abstract work only had to be seen to understand the level of demand. And Jean Dubuffet’s Chronique was once owned by the television producer and noted collector Mark Goodson.
The Cy Twombly work on paper was bought at a good price for a work from this highly-prized series. There was good bidding on Chara Shreyer’s Sam Gilliam bevel-edge painting; it was one of five Gilliam’s sold during the sales cycle. The hammer ratio for all five paintings together was a strong 1.22 but Butterfly, Feeling was both the most expensive work and the one with the highest hammer ratio, suggesting buyers are waiting for the right Gilliam to bid on. The only Gilliam with a higher hammer ratio among the five was a very strong late work on paper that sold for $138,600. A Jonas Wood pot painting, a seven-foot editioned wood “Companion” sculpture by KAWS and a George Condo painting once owned by the Mugrabi family depicting Elliot Spitzer (made infamous in an FBI report as client number 9 of an escort service) were all sold at compromise prices that still landed them in the top ten lots by price.
The top ten lots with the most dynamic bidding were a very different story. Coincidentally, Miyoko Ito’s Surrealism-inflected work from 1975 made the list of most bid upon works in these same sales a year before. Last year, Untitled (#118) was estimated at $40,000 and sold for three times the estimate or $157,500 with fees. This year, Confrontation from 1970 was also estimated at $40,000. This time is sold for ten times the estimate to make $508,000 with fees. Perhaps more surprising is the Julian Opie, Four Bars that was estimated for a minimal $5000 but sold for nearly $50,000 with fees. Both Elaine de Kooning works sold well above their estimates. One was estimated at $15,000 and the other at $25,000. The latter work, made when she and her husband Bill were at Black Mountain College in 1948, sold for more than six times the estimate to make $207,900. Along with de Kooning, Dusti Bongé was a female Abstract Expressionist active during the middle of the 20th Century. Her small work on paper made six times the modest estimate of $6000. On the opposite end of the spectrum, Emily Xie’s NFT showed there is still life in this now-ridiculed market as one of her Memories of Qilin works sold for more than five times the minimal $5000 estimate. Works by Richard Mayhew, Susan Rotherenberg, Pope.L, Richard Hunt and Francesco Clemente all received attention from bidders. Richard Hunt and Pope.L died recently. Hunt is having a show at White Cube currently. Richard Mayhew has shown work at Venus Over Manhattan recently as well. Of the major artists of the 1980s, Francesco Clemente is the only one whose market remains disorganized and undervalued. A work estimated at $5000 selling for nearly $30,000 won’t change that … yet. But it does indicate continuing curiosity in the artist’s work.
The market share numbers for these mid-season sales don’t reveal much about the state of the market overall. Alma Thomas appears on the list based upon a single painting. Many of the other artists appeared on the list because of the results of a single work with a few other lesser works filling out the market share. A dozen Andy Warhol works estimated at $1.5 million were sold for only a little more than $1.08 million. Four of the Warhols were withdrawn and a fifth was bought in. Richard Prince had 2% of the total dollars spent even though only six of the ten works offered found buyers—in addition, three of those six works were sold below the estimate. Alexander Calder had all six works sell for prices that resulted in a 1.64 hammer ratio. But all but one were paintings or works on paper which are the type of Calders that appear in these sales.
The bidding quintiles are similar to what we saw in London. The two top quintiles were soft with hammer ratios well below past auctions. The middle quintile saw the strongest bidding for lots estimated between $20,000 and $40,000. The average premium price was $52,861. According to Clare McAndrew’s report on the state of the art market for 2023, the $50,000 and below market sector is where the market saw growth last year. That momentum seems to be continuing last week. The middle low quintile was weaker than that. But the bottom quintile of works priced at $10,000 or below was where the strongest bidding seemed to take place. The overall hammer ratio for that quintile was the strongest at 1.28 with works averaging a selling price of $11,950.