Sale-rooms
Who will buy?
Alistair McAlpine
The sale-rooms have changed in the last two years. The change has been a slow one, and it is hard to pinpoint any particular time when it happened, but it has hap- pened. No longer does the season of Impressionist and Modern sales zing with excitement, no longer do the catalogues for those sales pile several feet high on the dealers' desks. When the slump started there was the excitement of watching fail- ure, then the fear of being part of that fail- ure. Now there is just the nostalgia for a past age. Dealers have closed, some in liqu- idation, some just in despair.
Experts from Sotheby's and Christie's have gone to seek their fortunes elsewhere. The accounts department, in the past so liberal with credit, now rules. Catalogues are more modest affairs. Important lots that once occupied several pages with their description and copious provenances now share a page with lots less blessed with quality. A page saved here, a page saved there: economy is the order of the day, economy and mechanisation, computers and the youth that drives them. The sales themselves are different. Now fewer people come to bid, and nobody comes to watch. The auctioneer has speeded up his act: no longer is it 50 lots to the hour, 50 lots often take 30 minutes these days.
The dealers themselves are up for sale. The collection of the Nigel Greenwood Gallery is to be sold on 15 October. The contents of the Arthur Davidson Gallery will come up soon at Sotheby's — Arthur Davidson who so stylishly said goodbye to his bankers, leaving them the keys to Bath, his house and business, fed up with the whole thing. T. Crowther and Sons, dealers in architectural furnishing and statuary, are clearing their yard in the North End Road at Christie's on 12, 13 and 14 October.
There will be a lot of these sales in the year to come. Will there be bargains? If you like something and the price has fallen to a point where you can afford to buy, then surely it must be a bargain. Will the market rise again? Almost inevitably, but when? At the beginning of this century paintings of horses by J.N. Sartorius fetched high prices. The market collapsed and interest shown in paintings of horses was small, even if they were by Stubbs, who was infinitely better than the average horse-painter. In the Sixties, Paul Mellon started to buy English 18th-century paint- ings; by the beginning of the Eighties the market in horses was really trotting along; by the end of the Eighties it was at full gal- lop, paintings by J.N. Sartorius then fetch- ing hundreds of thousands of pounds, those by Stubbs fetching millions. It is all a mat- ter of time. Meanwhile the fashion seems to be for buying clothes and other ephemera. Christie's are selling James II's wedding suit on 17 November, and a pretty smart suit it is — and a pretty smart price it is expected to fetch. Christie's hope for a world record; their estimate is in excess of £200,000. In America Sotheby's are selling almost everything, from Arabian horses on 19 September to comic art on 30 Septem- ber. Christie's had a sale of 'Fine Toys, Dolls and Teddy Bears' at South Kensing- ton on 17 and 24 September. It seems that the real winners in the art market are those who did not buy art, but kept every triviali- ty they were ever given. In Los Angeles on 17 October Sotheby's are selling the original art work for Walt Disney's Beauty and the Beast. This was Disney's first cartoon film to use his revolu- tionary computer animation production system. It is remarkable how real the images from Disney's films have become.. I was walking down Main Street America la Euro Disney, when out from behind a wall popped Donald Duck. In seconds a middle- aged French lady took him by his wing, catching the poor creature off balance, and dragged him backwards across a road to where her husband waited with a camera. She had captured the Duck, not for her children, but rather to have her photograph taken with it. She held the struggling bird while her husband did just that. Not once did she address one word to Donald Duck, or for that matter did the man inside the duck suit do other than squawk. At a recent Sotheby's sale of 'Historic Aircraft, Aeronautica and Models', a Hawker Hunter MK-53G Boom was being offered for about the same price as James II's wedding suit. It remained unsold. The art market really is very strange these days, but do not despair, for in Sotheby's sale of `Coins, Medals and Paper Money', 1-:),! 1397 is a large, white Bank of England t-J, note, issued in 1925. It will fetch £400. It you had just kept it in your pocket you would now almost show a profit.
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