Sale-rooms
London • loses ground
Peter Watson
This autumn the usual suspects will be in the frame in the sale-rooms: Vincent `Dutch Vince' Van Gogh, Edouard 'Black Ted' Manet, Pablo 'The Catalan' Picasso. Their best pictures are expected to fetch, respectively, 35, 40 and 45 million dollars. The numbers game was never this lucra- tive.
As with any game, however, the only way to stay ahead is to look ahead. Even the big two auction houses have grown, well, if not nervous certainly thoughtful about the fact that, over the past eight years, the proportion of their income derived from Impressionist, modern and contemporary art has soared from around 13 per cent to 46 per cent and this season could go to more than 50 per cent. A bit like Mr Alphonse Capone putting all his bootleg in one hearse. Make no mistake, this November could see the art world's biggest bonanza yet and this in a world where, recently, broken records have been as thick on the ground as hurricane rubble. In one extraordinary 24-hour period in November, apart from the 'ordinary' (i.e. seven-digit) Degas, Renoirs and Monets on sale, there are six paintings being sold each of which is expected to land at least $20 million. With that amount of dollars changing wallets so swiftly, this will be a green party to end all green parties.
At the same time, beyond all this shining splendour, beneath the deep purple prose of the auction houses' press offices, several subtle changes can be fathomed. The first is highlighted by the growth at Christie's in the past 12 months. According to the firm's own statistics, this is how they have put on (financial) weight in 1988-89: Australia has grown 165 per cent; Hong Kong 137 per cent; New York 103 per cent; Monaco 90 per cent; Holland 58 per cent; Italy 47 per cent, and London 41 per cent.
The art world has always prided itself on being international but it is now interna- tional in a new sense. London is at last losing the dominance it has had since the Napoleonic wars. The London and New York figures relate to a much higher base, of course, when compared with other auction centres. But the point essentially remains and carries with it an implication for collector and dealer alike that there will be a growth of nationalism in the arts: Australian art fetching high prices in Mel- bourne, Oriental art in Hong Kong, Dutch art in Amsterdam, and so on. Thus the art world will be international and more nationalistic at the same time.
Sotheby's Art Market Bulletin, a special- ised but always fascinating four-page quarterly sent to selected customers, also quietly identifies a few other changes worth mentioning. Jewellery is clearly a future battleground between dealers and sale-rooms: people are wearing (rather than simply amassing) even expensive rocks again and the sale-rooms see great potential here. Even emeralds, once re- garded as unlucky, are booming. Likewise Continental ceramics (Italian maiolica, for example), where Sotheby's have identified a clutch of 'new, young, eager collectors entering the field'. Likewise American furniture, which at one time only in- terested Americans but now attracts collec- tors from all over the shop. And likewise Spanish art. The changed political and commercial climate south of the Pyrenees has produced 'a marked rise' in the number of Spanish collectors. The lowered profile of London is further emphasised by the number of American single-owner collections coming up for sale in Manhattan this autumn: those of Dor- rance (of Campbell's soup fame), Billy Wilder and Robert Mayer, the Garden Collection of books and manuscripts, plus works from the Getty and Mellon collec- tions. It is easy to overlook the fact that, this century, the Americans, however fad- dy or yuppie they might be en masse at the moment, have been much greater collec- tors than the British. The auction houses in New York are currently reaping the ben- efit.
One deep irony amid this panorama of robust health has so far gone unremarked. It is the apparent divorce between the collecting and other instincts. Picasso's most famous painting, `Guernica', contains a stark and despairing political element; Van Gogh finished his days in an asylum; much modern and contemporary art — the German expressionists, Francis Bacon, the Bauhaus — has concerned itself with in- dustrialisation and other ambiguous hor- rors of the 20th century. Yet the last paragraph of the press release announcing the sale of the Robert Mayer collection in New York strikes a unique note. It points out that his widow Buddy is selling the Liechtensteins, the Warhols, the Raus- chenbergs and the Rosenquists to raise money to provide better health care and to `improve educational opportunities and enhance the quality of life of the older adults in our community'.
The wonder is that Buddy Mayer is, to date, the only owner of a great collection to have had this idea, despite the huge sums raised at auction. 'Collecting' art has a solid ring to it; it purports to be the noblest form of shopping known to man. Buddy Mayer's sale puts us all in our place.
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