Leonardo da Vinci's Salvator Mundi masks uneven market recovery

Last week was what the Americans call “gigaweek” in the sale rooms because New York hosts the high value Impressionist, Modern and Contemporary art sales. These biannual series (May and November) reached a peak in May 2015 at $2.75 billion , but sunk a year later to just over $1 billion. Since then, they have been edging back up again, reaching $1.6 billion this May.   

For the auction houses – and market confidence in general – it was important that this November’s gigaweek maintained the upward momentum – one good reason for Christie’s to include a Leonardo da Vinci (usually the terrain of the Old Master sales) valued at $100 million .

As it was, Salvator Mundi made $450 million, lifting the week’s takings to $2.18 billion. But to assess the real performance of the core Impressionist, Modern and Contemporary markets we need to disregard the Leonardo because it is an Old Master, so reducing the gigaweek total to $1.7 billion.

This still represents a healthy 30 per cent increase from last November’s $1.3 billion sales, but when broken down reveals an unexpected imbalance between the two categories of Modern and Contemporary art.

Not only did Impressionist and Modern art exceed the normally superior Contemporary art total at Sotheby’s and Christie’s in New York, but the upward curve for Modern art (up 75 per cent since last November) was far greater than for Contemporary art (up nine per cent, excluding the Leonardo, since last November). 

At Christie’s Impressionist and Modern sale, impressive record prices were set for an early, 1913 abstraction by Fernand Leger ($70 million); a surreal landscape by Magritte ($20.6 million); and a classic, densely patterned Vuillard interior ($17.7 million). 

The most conspicuous buying pattern was the strength of Asian bidding, which accounted for about 40 per cent of the value of Christie’s $479 million sale, one of its best ever in this category. Asian buyers won top lots by van Gogh, Picasso, Renoir, Chagall, Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth.

The van Gogh of a field worker sold well above estimate for $81.3 million, close to a record a price. The Hepworth, a mahogany carving of an abstracted female figure, sold for $1.6 million – an increase in value by an average 13 per cent each year since 1993, when it last sold, for $57,500.

At Sotheby’s equivalent $270 million modern art sale, Asian bidders contributed to nearer 50 per cent of the total, buying top lots by Cézanne, Chagall, Monet and Gauguin. For the top lot, the Chagall classic, Les Amoureux, an Asian bidder pushed a patriotic Russian collector (Chagall was Russian) into paying a record $28 million.

At Phillips, which straddles the modern and contemporary in one sale, the strongest performer was a drawing by Picasso owned by the family of Elvis Presley’s music publisher, Julian Aberbach, which sold for $9.3 million (eight times the estimate), to an Asian buyer.

Apart from a $32 million Warhol of Mao, a $14.7 million bronze spider by Louise Bourgeois, and a record $8.9 million for an ebullient late work by the abstract expressionist Hans Hofmann, Asian buyers for high-end contemporary material were hard to detect at any of the evening sales.

There were numerous records lower down the price scale, though. African American artists continue to enjoy increasing interest with new records for Jack Whitten (fresh from a sell-out at Hauser & Wirth in London), and Kerry James Marshall, both represented in Tate Modern’s recent exhibition Soul of a Nation.

As a testimony to the queue of buyers at Marshall’s last show at Jack Shainman’s gallery in New York, a painting that was bought two years ago, reportedly for $750,000, had nine different telephone bidders and sold for five times its $5 million estimate. Also shown by Shainman is Britain’s Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, who joined the winners with a six-times estimate record of $1.6 million for a lively dance scene.

All-American stars benefitting from recent and current exposure at the Whitney Museum of American Art included Laura Owens (an eight-times estimate $1.75 million for a swirling mixed media abstract at Sotheby’s), and Shara Hughes, an artist in whom Charles Saatchi has made profitable investments, whose record shifted up to $85,000 for painting of a room with a view of boats sailing, estimated at $10,000 by Phillips. 

In the end, it was superior material and Asian bidding that lifted the Impressionist and Modern sales above Contemporary. There was no real difference between Sotheby’s and Christie’s in the Contemporary sales, and had the Leonardo been sold in an Old Master sale, the slow recovery of the Contemporary market would have been clearer for all to see.

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