ARTS
Sale-rooms
A house divided
The auctioneer's hammer was already high in the air and about to come down on an Impressionist lot with resounding finali- ty when a man by the door yelled, 'Bid- ding'. The latest auctions at Sotheby's included the London debut of their new star auctioneer Simon de Pury, and his sharp-eyed nemesis in the crowd was his predecessor, Julian Barran. De Pury did not hesitate and the picture quickly dou-, bled in price, but that incident, during a sale much vaunted in advance at which the overwhelming majority of the lots failed to reach the lower estimate, was symbolic of the deep divisions now underlying the art market in general and the auction rooms in particular. The boom days of sky-high art prices and even higher yen, and glittering parties to celebrate them, are long gone (the evening auction, reflecting the new realism, is no longer black tie), and barely concealed confusion permeates the Lon- don flagship of the Sotheby's fleet.
Since the acquisition of Sotheby's by the American property developer Alfred Taub- man in 1983 the house has been a divided one. During the ensuing period of econom- ic prosperity, however, New York and Lon- don were able to work in concert London brought in prestige, New York money. London flushed out the sellers, New York the buyers. But when the finan- cial markets collapsed, fissures in the man- agement structure widened. At this summer's sales they have become visible.
`In reality', Bernard de Grunne, head of Sotheby's Tribal Art department in New York, was overheard saying scornfully at a dinner party in Pimlico, 'London accounts 'I like the fact that he hasn't allowed an increased arts subsidy to go to his head.' for something like ten per cent of the prof- its, but we have more people working in Bond Street than on York Avenue.' Our host, James Stourton, a director in the chairman's office in London, pointed out that even if this were true, without the London presence Sotheby's would become just another American supermarket. Sothe- by's does not produce separate figures for New York and London in its financial report, and the press office has not been able to comment on de Grunne's claim. What is undeniable is that New York does owe its past commercial successes to the international pre-eminence of London.
Sotheby's American masters, however, are too penny-pinching these days to worry about prestige, or to give credit where credit is due. It has just been decided that the cash-cow Impressionist and Modern departments in New York and London will be amalgamated into one, predictably enough to be run from New York by the ambitious Englishman David Nash whose American wife Lucy Mitchell-Innes is head of the Contemporary department in New York. Michael Strauss, now about to relinquish direct control of the London department, started at Sotheby's 30 years ago on the same day as Nash, except that Strauss came to work as a cataloguer and Nash as a porter. Strauss remains a mem- ber of the London board of directors responsible for the Fine Arts departments, but all the signs of a coup d'etat are there.
Michael Ainslie, president and chief executive of Sotheby's, who has moved from New York to oversee the changes personally, downplays their significance. 'It is not a merger, we just unified the two departments,' is his oblique explanation. Mr Ainslie admits that 'it is a trend that will affect other areas as well, as we seek to create unified, worldwide departments'. Asked why the changes did not come soon- er, one director explains: 'We were too busy making money to make changes'.
Equally noticeable is the Americanisa- tion of the younger generation, the 'num- ber twos', in London. 'The people who joined since the Taubman takeover', says David Fife-Jameson, a private dealer in Old Masters who used to work for Sothe- by's, 'find that they cannot rise to the top of the bigger departments by expertise, and new qualities are now in demand there.' The most talked-about example of the 'new qualities' is Melanie Clore, the number two in the Impressionist and Modern depart- ment, who is widely seen as the antithesis of the courtly James Stourton, another whizz-kid but of the old school. Gallery gossip has romantically linked them as an ideal match, though Stourton denies this, adding: 'Melanie would eat me for break- fast.' A sale-room wit dubs Clore 'the Julie Burchill of Bond Street'.
The 'new qualities', at variance with the auction-house tradition, are buyer- rather than seller-oriented. 'Since the crash', says Fife-Jameson, 'Sotheby's has had an overt policy of wooing buyers rather than sellers.' Fiona Barclay, a dealer with the Richard Green Gallery, says that 'in the old days, buyers were merely people about to be sep- arated from their money, whilst the sellers lunched with the chairman. Now the tables have been turned, and Sotheby's have only themselves to blame if sellers go to private dealers instead.'
The shift of emphasis is part of the Americanisation of Sotheby's, now eroding London's autonomy. A recent memo to departments was pompously entitled 'The Philosophy of Cataloguing' and urged experts to concentrate on marketing by making sale material in the catalogues sound more attractive — instead of describing it in purely scholarly terms. The response from Alexandra Foley, an arms and armour expert, was, 'We are not selling washing machines, you know'. The future of Britain in Europe is also a factor. Not one of the buyers at the last Impressionist sale, which took in £13.8 mil- lion, was British. Twenty-two lots went to Continental buyers, five to America and the Far East. With the prospect of Euro- pean trade barriers coming down, Sothe- by's may wonder why they should hold such sales in London in the first place. 'Impres- sionists are the most mobile market there is,' Lord Gowrie, chairman of Sotheby's London, told me, 'and there is no God- given reason why it should be run from London.' At present France will not allow a foreign-owned auction house to hold a Paris sale. 'If they weren't so anti-free trade, if they had a Madame Thatcher instead of a Madame Cresson,' Lord Gowrie pointed out, 'they could easily take the business away from London.' Another reason for his pessimism is his belief that `by the end of the millennium most of our business will be in Contemporary art', an area in which Britain has never played a significant role. The future of Sotheby's London seems bleak. With the company's American mas- ters looking to the Continent for both buy- ers and sellers, money as well as prestige, London may be marginalised as a curiosity shop, with the real business being done elsewhere. It is no coincidence that the Swiss Simon de Fury has now replaced his British rival Julian Barran as star auction- eer. 'The Channel Tunnel will isolate Britain once and for all,' he jokes. Barran, who spent the last three years heading the Paris office, sadly concurs, and quotes the French proverb: `Quand vous etes a la chasse, les choses changent a la maison'.
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