Money, money money
Susan Moore
No one can deny that the London summer season ended with a bang. The sale of a 'lost' monumental panel painting by the great Flemish master Sir Peter Paul Rubens at Sotheby's on 10 July for almost £50 million (with premium) — its estimate was a mere £4 million to 16 million — was
one of those rare moments of thrilling saleroom theatre. The house was packed — every ticketed seat was taken and the gallery stood cheek by jowl, crushed against the walls and spilling down the staircase. And unlike those crowded but dreary Impressionist sales where bidders vie in bloodless battles of telephonic ping-pong, the players or their representatives were all here in person — well, almost all of them. As the gavel came down at £45 million, the room burst into applause.
Rubens's 'Massacre of the Innocents' had become the most expensive Old Master painting ever sold, the most expensive work of art sold in London and the third most expensive sold anywhere. Its sale also demonstrated once again that when competing against a committed and very rich private collector, no museum in the world has a hope of securing an art-market trophy that everyone seemed to want. As if to emphasise the point, London dealer Sam Fogg said after the sale that his anonymous client was willing — and expecting — to pay far, far more for the picture. (That client is the Canadian Lord Thomson of Fleet, a former proprietor of the Times and a collector of mediaeval manuscripts and ivories; it is his son, David, who has a penchant for Rubens.) The Getty Museum, meanwhile, the richest arts institution in the world, was obliged to drop out of the contest at £42 million — museum directors are, after all, obliged to pre-set bidding ceilings with their trustees. As for the National Gallery of London, which made the most strenuous efforts to do what it could to raise funds before the sale, it was literally out of the picture. How could it not be when the new director finds himself with an acquisitions budget from central government of nil and support from the Lottery Fund of up to £10 million?
It may be convenient to talk about an art market, but of course it is not a 'market' in any meaningful sense at all. As this occasion witnessed, offering not just one Rubens but two and a Rembrandt, each work of art is different and each sale brings together a different set of personalities and circumstances. This is a game with guidelines but no rules. It is probably no exaggeration to say that 'The Massacre of the Innocents' presented collectors and curators with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity — a major work in near perfect condition by one of the greatest masters of Western art, and one of very few important works by Rubens ever likely to come up for sale.
The one drawback was that it represented one of the most harrowing and bloodthirsty of all biblical subjects. And Rubens is not an artist to hold back. As a piece of painting it is glorious — but this is no picture for the fainthearted. The challenging subject matter was a potential major deterrent. Given that its aged German owner previously believed the picture to be the work of one Jan van den Hoecke, a Rubens pupil and workshop assistant, and worth nearer £50,000 than £50 million, she was happy to have it offered with an encouragingly low estimate — an estimate also in line with the current auction record for a Rubens.
No sooner had the Rubens sold when the buzz began that the sale was great news for London — it is — and that Old Master paintings had been propelled from Impressionism's poor relation to the big league. Has everyone overlooked the crucial point about once-in-a-lifetime pictures? Certainly, the sale may have the effect of raising the field's profile but anyone thinking of investing not for love hut money would do well to consider the commercial fortunes of the other two big pictures on offer. The Rubens portrait of a man as the god Mars, sold privately for almost £7.5 million in 1988, returned to the market in 2000 to sell for £.5 million at auction and now plunged to sell for /4.4 million. It was, of course, the best buy of the sale, cannily secured on the reserve by dealer Johnny van Haeften — after all, it is no reflection of the quality of picture that it should have yo-yoed in and out of the market for years.
As for the Rembrandt portrait of a young woman, estimated at £10 million to £15 million, she failed to elicit a single bid. There are three other very expensive Rembrandts currently out there with the international art trade (this is by no means the best one) — and no collector or curator seems in a hurry to snap up any of them.
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