Christie's is risen again
Evelyn Joll
INSIDE CHRISTIE'S by John Herbert Hodder & Stoughton, £20, pp. 407 In The Great Gatsby, Meyer Wolfsheim, the man who 'fixed the 1919 World Series', says to the narrator: 'I understand you're looking for a business gonnegtion'. It was Christie's `gonnegtions' with the rich and the titled which brought them their busi- ness, from the founding of the firm in 1766 until the end of the second world war. But then things began to go wrong. 'The Old Guard', as John Herbert calls them, ex- pected clients to come to them, whereas Sotheby's went out to woo them. New recruits were paid next to nothing, and were not encouraged to show initiative, so that many left. 'Abroad' was considered with deep suspicion, so much so that 'the majority of letters in French or German or other foreign languages went straight into the wastepaper basket'. Expertise in cata- loguing had hardly advanced from the 1890s when a recruit in the furniture department was told: 'My boy, it's quite easy; if it's curly you call it Louis XV; if it's straight it's Louis XVI, and if it's Boulle it's Boulle.'
Things were thus when John Herbert joined Christie's in May 1958 to run the press office. Within a few months, Sotheby's, by wresting the seven Impress- ionist pictures in the Goldschmidt collect- ion from Christie's and selling them for record prices, seized the initiative in the picture market, a department in which Christie's had hitherto been as dominant as Sotheby's in books. Under Peter Wilson's leadership, Sotheby's then went from strength to strength while Christie's floun- dered, actually making a loss in 1963.
inside Christie's, is a long book and not without longueurs but on the whole Her- bert, who became a director in 1959, gives a frank, readable and good-humoured account of the slow but eventually spec- tacular recovery of the firm. Generous praise is given to the architects of this recovery: Peter Chance and Jo Floyd, above all, as successive chairmen, together with the business acumen of Guy Hannen and the energy with which David Bathurst ran Christie's New York branch — to mention only a few of the many responsi- ble for Christie's present prosperity, although the plethora of Christian names only may confuse those unfamiliar with the firm.
The salerooms get regular and wide coverage in the press. As Public Relations Officer Herbert's job was to ensure that Christie's successes received maximum publicity while trying to minimise their not infrequent failures. This was the tricky part, for the press love failure second only to fakes in the art world, and there are indications that Herbert, who was a journ- alist before joining Christie's, was more open with the press than some of his colleagues liked.
Issues such as the introduction of the buyer's premium are fairly dealt with, although insufficient weight is given to the main reason why the trade was so opposed to it: the fact that the auctioneers were then in a position to reduce the vendor's commission in order to take business from the dealers, which they undoubtedly did and continue to do. There are some good stories and none more entertaining than that concerning the sale of Rembrandt's Portrait of Titus in March 1965. Mr Norton Simon, arriving in London from Los Angeles in the middle of the night before the sale, then issued bidding instructions of a bizarre complexity beyond even the imagination of Lewis Carroll. No wonder things went wrong at the sale, an event brilliantly enshrined in auction history by Osbert Lancaster's cartoon: 'Don't forget that by private arrangement Lady Little- hampton is still in the bidding as long as 'I'll have the atrociously spelt main course.' she is standing on her head'.
Occasionally one suspects that the au- thor has not fully fathomed the art market, as, for instance, when he counsels Noel Annesley, who was considering an offer to join Colnaghi's, that 'he wouldn't like being a dealer with the fundamental moral position of not always offering a collector a true price . . .' For, if this book demon- strates anything, it is that a work of art has no 'true' price but only that which someone is prepared to pay for it, whether at auction or from a dealer.
Not surprisingly, there is a great deal here about Sotheby's, who themselves had to be rescued by a 'White Knight', Alfred Taubman, in 1983. The rivalry between the two firms was and continues to be extreme- ly fierce. Indeed, their only common ground in the past seems to have been a dread of Geraldine Norman, then sale- room correspondent of the Times, who campaigned over a long period to make the auctioneers publish the 'bought in' figures in each sale, a goal she finally achieved in 1970. More recently, it appears to an outsider that both houses are prepared to promise owners almost anything in order to stop them going to their rivals, a policy which is apt to result in failure, and one which, now that both firms have turnovers of over £1 billion, should cease to the advantage of all concerned. Christie's have so far properly and wisely declined to `branch into quasi-related financial ser- vices', such as Sotheby's did when they lent 25 million dollars to Alan Bond to enable him to buy Van Gogh's Irises in November 1987. This is liable to distort the market and is therefore viewed by many as an unacceptable diversification of an auctioneer's proper function.
As John Herbert took early retirement in 1985, his story is brought up to date from published sale results and also by a shrewd analysis of the present state of the art market by Jack Baer, the highly respected dealer who runs Hazlitt, Gooden & Fox. Baer laments the emergence of investment and status-seeking buyers in the place of those who collected pictures purely for pleasure 40 years ago. He might have added that, although the salerooms are now usually packed, auctions are far less entertaining than they used to be, partly because buyers now remain anonymous, due to the 'paddle' system of bidding, whereas the chief interest in a sale is who buys what, and partly because so much bidding is now done by telephone. When two telephone-bidders are in competition, the proceedings become intolerably te- dious.
Hodder & Stoughton advertise this book as revealing 'The Personalities, Politics and Prices of the Power Game Played out with Masterpieces . . .', which reads like the synopsis for an American soap opera. Even 'The New Guard' in the great firm will surely consider this description over the top.
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