Auctioneer by appointment to the world’s new rich
Joanna Pitman meets Jussi Pylkkanen, president of Christie’s Europe, who says buyers from Russia, China and the Middle East are driving art prices to record highs
In 1987, shortly after joining Christie’s auction house in London as a 23year-old English Literature graduate from Oxford, Jussi Pylkkanen nervously approached the head of the Impressionists department, James Roundell, and asked if he could transfer to his team. ‘He was a kind of god in the company. He’d just sold Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” to a Japanese insurance company for almost $40 million. He was the most important man in Christie’s,’ recalls Pylkkanen. A year later, Pylkkanen joined the Impressionists department; 20 years on, he has replaced Roundell as the colossus of Christie’s European operations. Pylkkanen is the president of Christie’s Europe and the company’s top-flight auctioneer this side of the Atlantic. Last month he presided over a week of auctions in London that realised £200 million, and broke price records for 17 artists. Forty-two lots sold for over £1 million.
One has come to think of the £1 million painting as pretty commonplace these days, but now prices of up to £40 million are being fetched by single works of art and there seems to be no sign of the market’s current buoyancy subsiding.
‘I’ve seen two cycles in 21 years working in the art markets. The first boom I saw was from 1987 to 1989 when lots of artworks sold for multi-million-dollar prices. Christie’s and Sotheby’s started chasing the big sales after “Sunflowers” was sold, and a number of paintings were sold for £10 million plus. But it was a shallow market, fuelled with atypical money from banks and other financial services companies. In those days profitable companies were buying art to give themselves a bit of gloss. Today the market’s strength is quite different.’ Over the last seven or eight years, there has been consistent growth in the value of pictures. Several things have combined to produce this. One is the very high calibre of pictures being offered for auction by sellers taking advantage of the strong markets. Another is the breadth of competition among buyers which reflects a far more global art collecting community than existed in the 1980s. Finally, there are many more deep-pocketed collectors around, not only from Europe and North America but also from Russia, the CIS, the Middle East and China. Thousands of millionaires are clamouring for art, and around them international art advisers are breeding, like Gucci-shod mice, in the smarter neighbourhoods of cities from Beijing to Delhi to Dubai and Moscow. Colossal amounts of money are afloat, looking for artworks to buy.
Last November, at a Christie’s auction of Impressionist art in New York, $500 million was taken. One of the lots was Gustav Klimt’s ‘Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II’, which sold for $87,936,000, the highest price ever paid at Christie’s for a work of art. ‘That was a symbolic sale,’ says Pylkkanen. ‘That amount of money coming in from a single sale shows the impact of the change in the markets. It gives a picture of a healthy market which is sustainable.’ Pylkkanen is of Finnish descent but has lived all his life in England. He also speaks French and German, while his blond hair and Baltic complexion no doubt ease his passage among Russian buyers: he’s pictured in the current Christie’s magazine flanked by two unambiguously large and potentially acquisitive Russians, at a late-night preview of a sale of Russian art. In the next picture, Viscount Linley, chairman of Christie’s UK, is pictured talking to the blonde-haired, leopardskin-clad Irina Sitrina of Gazprom.
After a big international sale, Pylkkanen will typically fly out to visit his buyers. Who exactly are they? In the early 20th century, a margarine magnate named Auguste Pellerin became the owner of the largest collection of paintings by Cézanne. It seems that nothing much has changed. In Russia the collectors are predominantly oil and gas tycoons, as well as real-estate dealers. In the Middle East they are typically members of royal families. In Britain and America, they work in the financial services industry.
Pylkkanen claims that there are now three times as many buyers at the top end of the market as there were during the previous boom. ‘Buyers from Russia, the Middle East and China are appearing in significant numbers. These are people from three very sophisticated cultures with long histories of collecting art. As a result of social, political and economic changes, the door has been swung open for the Russians to buy again, for the Chinese to start buying international art and for Middle Eastern buyers too. Because those changes are unlikely to be reversed, these new buyers are here to stay.’ The changes in the markets are also clearly reflected in changes to Christie’s staff. ‘Buyers are typically much younger than they used to be. Our assessments show that people used to collect between the ages of 52 and 65. Now they begin in their forties. At Christie’s when I started the directors were all in their late fifties. Now most of us are in our forties. And we’re much more multinational as a team. We need people who understand the cultures and speak the languages of our big buying markets.’ In addition to his strategic job, flying all over the world to better his understanding of clients and potential clients, Pylkkanen frequently steps on to the rostrum to conduct big auctions. ‘When you’re standing up there conducting an auction, you find yourself in a completely different zone. You’re totally focused on what you’re doing and some second sense tells you where the bids are going to come from.’ Pylkkanen was initially reluctant to put himself forward for auctioneering, but his wife, a magazine editor and publisher, persuaded him and he put himself through six months’ intensive training at auction school. ‘My first sale was of Indian contemporary art in 1995. Every mistake I made was under scrutiny. People were running up to the rostrum waving their paddles. And there was applause after every lot. Luckily they were a very sympathetic audience. Auctioneering is great fun, but it’s very revealing of a person. You have to be numerate, you have to keep a lot in your head, you have to be engaging, set a good pace and keep control, retain your poise when things go wrong and build a relationship with the audience.’ Before a big auction, he has a fixed ritual which involves having lunch alone in a particular restaurant and then spending an hour and a half looking over the list of potential bidders. His most lively auction was that of Shirley Bassey’s gowns in 2003 with the singer herself sitting in the front row. ‘She came up on to the rostrum several times and got very involved with the bidding. She sang songs between lots. It was amazing. And with the proceeds she set up a singing scholarship.’ ‘I feel incredibly fortunate to be working at the vanguard of the art market and taking these sales. It was extraordinary, for example, last month selling “Study for Portrait II” by Francis Bacon. It’s the finest of his papal series ever to come to market.’ It was subject to a bidding battle between a telephone bidder and a client in the room and eventually went, for £14,020,000, to Andrew Fabricant for Richard Gray Gallery. It was the second highest price ever paid for a postwar work of art. ‘In qualitative terms and financial terms we have to be clear that we are looking at art as an investment,’ he says. ‘But it is also important, culturally and socially, for people to buy art.’ Some may be buying to acquire the oily sheen of virtue and cultural responsibility, others may have more spiritually transcendent reasons; but frankly, if price records are being smashed with such regularity, then Jussi Pylkkanen probably doesn’t mind too much either way.
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