Record highs and rollercoaster Russian art sales: the latest art news
Record highs for modern and contemporary art in Paris
It’s been a significant week in Paris where the three leading auction rooms, Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Artcurial notched up €110 million (£96.5 million) for a series of modern and contemporary art sales.
A Dutch period van Gogh (€7.1 million), an abstract piece by the American Mark Tobey (€1.4 million), and a swirling canvas by Japanese artist Kazuo Shiraga, who painted with his feet while swinging from the rafters (€8.7 million) all realised record sales. Not to mention the British surrealists (although the French are reluctant to accept there ever was such a thing).
Surrealist paintings from Arturo Schwarz’s collection (a Marcel Duchamp expert) by subversive feminist Ithell Colquhoun, and by Birmingham’s answer to Rene Magritte, Conroy Maddox, soared over estimates to sell for €35,000 and €56,200 respectively.
London’s art market has been living with the noisy acceleration of modern and contemporary art sales in Paris ever since the issue of Brexit came into play: Christie’s contemporary art sales in Paris nearly doubled between 2015 and 2017, and Sotheby’s contemporary art sales in Paris last week were 43 per cent up on this time last year.
London’s lead is still considerable, however. The forthcoming sales of Impressionist, Modern and Contemporary art at Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Phillips are expected to fetch over £400 million, led by Peter Doig and Jean-Michel Basquiat’s £8 million.
But the acceleration rate is far greater in Paris than in London. In fact, London’s expectations this month are 33 per cent down on June 2015. This may be due to Christie’s decision to play down the June season and build up October for Frieze week, but expect competition from the French who are doing the same thing in Paris in October during their contemporary art fair, FIAC.
Rollercoaster Russian art sales
London’s Russian art sales recovered to £38 million by November 2017 having sunk to an all-time low of £16.4 million in June 2016 but last week took a step back when the sales dropped again to under £24 million.
Of the four auction houses, only Christie’s lived up to expectations in its fine art sale which saw an intimate self-portrait by Konstantin Somov that belonged to his companion, Boris Snejkofsky, spiral over an £8,000 estimate to sell for £172,500.
An evocative female bust by Séraphin Soudbinine, once Rodin’s principle carver, estimated at £40,000 sold for £308,750, and a life-size drawing of a Spanish dancer, thought to be Anna Pavlova, by art deco artist Alexandre Iacovleff, reached a record £1.1 million.
It is a measure of how far the Russian art market has advanced that the same drawing was bought in 1995 for just £8,600. But this round of sales was short on major works and may have been affected by the current confidence-sapping political tremors, expulsions and sanctions.
