Collecting
Finders keepers
The more bearish the stock market, the more bull there will be in the art market. It is one of the natural laws of Bond Street life. For the past few years the people from Sotheby's and Christie's, and all points in between, have been telling the rest of us that there is abroad in the land a new kind of collector, men and women who have new money but are not spivs, who really do prefer Guercino to Gucci. Twice in the last 20 years, in the early Seventies and again in the early Eighties, as soon as a stock market slump came, the art market fol- lowed, as new collectors off-loaded what they had recently acquired. Not this time, we are told. This time it is different.
We shall soon see. The forthcoming auction season contains (unless they are withdrawn) some first-rate art, beautiful works by Van Gogh, Degas and Gauguin at the top end of the market but also excellent examples of 19th- and 20th- century paintings and objects. If prices don't match expectations, it won't be because the sales themselves are weak; it will be because the punters aren't punting.
Lord Gowrie, head of Sotheby's in London, puts the case for the new collector most forcefully. He believes that, just as Peter Wilson, his predecessor in Bond Street, created the modern auction mar- ket, so Alfred Taubman, the American property developer who bought Sotheby's in 1983, has helped create this new kind of collector. 'Many of the people who have made small fortunes in the City, or on Wall Street, or in Hong Kong, are in fact professional people — lawyers, accoun- tants — with sophisticated tastes. They have always been interested in the arts. Recently they have been able to afford to indulge their interests.' By implication, these sophisticated souls will not run away from the rostrum the minute a few econo- mic oaks get blown over.
`You can see what is happening most clearly in the Impressionist market,' says Gowrie. 'These pictures fetch such very high prices not just because they are very pretty and have excellent provenances, but mainly — to my mind — because they celebrate the bourgeois life, the kind of life, with the kind of values, that the new collectors hunger after. They want that kind of space, that kind of colour, that kind of calmness in their lives — servants, and doctors making house visits. Compare picture prices with yachts, private planes, luxury cars. Paintings are much more moral things to buy than those other gewgaws. It has happened before in his- tory, when even living painters were fabu- lously rich. Think of Rubens.'
None of the distinguished collectors who follow this introduction falls into the categ- ory of 'new boy', of course. Their particu- lar form of monomania is well developed, under control, and has been giving soph- isticated pleasure for years. They will welcome new collectors, however sophisti- cated, knowing what pleasures lie in store. But they will be waiting, and watching like the rest of us, to see whether an admittedly brilliant American property tycoon really has brought about a sea change in the art market.
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