Sale-rooms
Million-dollar masters
Peter Watson
Edgar Degas once remarked that a painting is 'a thing that demands as much cunning, astuteness and vice as the per- petration of a crime'. He had a way with Degas's 'Les Blanchisseuses', to be sold at Christie's on 30 November.
words, almost as much as he had a way with brushes. Degas was a difficult man: outspoken, argumentative, and irascible. Had he been alive this coming Monday, when one of his great pictures, 'Les Blan- chisseuses', is expected to fetch £4 million when it is auctioned at Christie's, he would no doubt have had some barbed words to match the occasion.
The occasion, barring accidents, will surely be the 120th time in the past year that an art object has changed hands for more than $1 million. The Impressionists, vilified as they were in their early years, would have marvelled more than anyone at this state of affairs. For our part, as that astonishing figure of 120 shows, we almost take million-dollar art for granted. Paint- ings, manuscripts, sculpture, furniture, jade — they all sell for seven figures now. Such is our worship of art in general, and Impressionists in particular, so changed are our values, that the million-dollar tag is about as surprising as a football team owned by Mr Robert Maxwell.
As with anything involving seven fig- ures, however, high-priced art is loaded with myths: self-perpetuating, self-serving myths, perhaps, but myths nonetheless. The current one is that the international art market is dominated by Japanese private collectors and, to a lesser extent, by the Americans. Well, enough figures about the million-dollar market are now available to test this myth, and, like so many myths, it is found wanting. The situation, as it exists at the end of 1987, may change, and may change quickly. But right now, a year into the million-dollar bonanza, the picture is somewhat different from the way it is generally understood.
It will be no surprise that New York outstrips everywhere else so far as million- dollar sales are concerned. But it is a surprise how close London runs it, closer than you might think. The actual figures for million-dollar sales are: New York, 60; London, 48; Geneva, 9; Hong Kong, 2. Nor is it a surprise that Impressionists are the pictures which bring in the high prices, followed by contemporary and modern pictures. What is more of a surprise is the extent to which jewellery has overtaken old masters, where first-rate pictures are now so scarce that they perform very poorly in relation to other categories. Again, the figures for $1 million objects are: Impressionists, 48; modern/ contemporary art, 30; jewellery, 20; old masters, 11; manuscripts, 4; furniture, 2; Chinese art, 2; sculpture, 1; mediaeval objects, 1.
The real surprise, however, lies with the buyers of million-dollar art. For the victors — if you can call them that — are not the Japanese private collectors or the Amer- icans, but, by a long chalk, the European trade. The figures below exclude totally anonymous buyers but, since these amount to roughly 18 per cent, they do not change the main thrust of the statistics.
Buyers US Japanese European Private 12 6 8 Trade 12 9 42 These figures show that, despite all the worry in the art trade that Alfred Taub- man, the American boss of Sotheby's, was turning his auction house into a retail outlet selling direct to private collectors, the trade in general, and the European trade in particular, is alive and well and kicking back quite hard.
It may be because, as Stephan Hahn, a New York dealer, told me recently, the trade has become very short of stock. But that doesn't change the argument. If deal- ers are short of stock it is because they have sold what they already have. The resilience of the trade — in which, it should be said, the London trade is pre-eminent — is to be applauded, the more so as many dealers have been moaning for months about how difficult the auction houses have been making it for them. Of course, it may be that the European trade is merely acting as agents for Japanese or American private collectors. I doubt it..Rather, it reflects the fact that the dealers have adjusted to the new price levels and realise that, if they are to stay in the game, they have got to compete at the highest levels.
Sotheby's recently circulated a list of the new telephone numbers of the people in their London press office. There were nine names on it. They have the same strength in New York, as do Christie's. With all these people blowing their trumpet, no wonder it sometimes seems as if the only people in the art world are C and S. But the dealers, thank heaven, are a long way from dead. Who knows, if there is a recession, maybe they will come into their own even more?
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