The Chinese to the Rescue

As many of us know, the Chinese have been very active in both the US financial (buying US bonds), industrial (buying companies) and art markets for Chinese art.  Kelly Crow of the Wall Street Journal writes that the wealthy Chinese art collectors may be the saviors of the the large auction houses. With upcoming sales of impressionist art, both Christie's and Sotheby's look for and perhaps need the active involvement of wealthy Chinese collectors to cross over from oriental art to western art. In the past Russians were very important to the success of the large art sales at the international houses, now perhaps that pattern is shifting.

As the important sales unfold over the next few weeks it will be interesting to see who the purchasers are, and if indeed many come from mainland China. I will try to post purchaser information from the top sales items if released. It will also be interesting to see if the momentum continues from some bright spots at the end of 2009.

Crow writes

Until recently, Asians have fixated on collecting their own cultural heritage, a focus that has steadily lifted prices for everything from Imperial porcelain vases to contemporary painters such as Zeng Fanzhi. Now, an influx of collectors from mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan are branching out to seek artists from the 20th century Western canon, such as Claude Monet, Paul Gauguin and Edgar Degas.

Joseph Lau, a billionaire real-estate developer from Hong Kong, is one of the bigger buyers, having paid Sotheby's $39 million for Gauguin's Tahitian bathing scene, "Te Poipoi (The Morning)," in late 2008.

Asian collectors, many of whom were educated in the West or travel there frequently, are seeking Impressionist artworks as new status symbols, said David Norman, co-chairman of Sotheby's Impressionist and modern art world-wide. They are buying colored gems and Champagne for similar reasons, he added.

"These people are already sophisticated buyers of their own work," he said, "but they've got an international outlook now, and they want the best-known names in art."

Their purchasing power was evident during the last major round of auctions in New York in November, when Asian collectors won several works, including Christie's $10.7 million Degas ballet scene, "Danseuses," and Sotheby's $8.1 million Picasso portrait, "Femme au chapeau vert."

Click HERE to read the full WSJ article.