NY Impressionist and Modern Sales Review

Colin Gleadell of the UK's Telegraph has a very good recap and analysis of the recent NY impressionist and modern sales at Sotheby's and Christie's.  Gleadell notes the sales were strong in some areas, not so strong in others, and still below the peak of Nov 2006 of nearly $850 million in sales.  He does state that sales were up 150% over the 2009 sales.

Gleadell states that once the Brody collection was sold (which set a record for a single owner sale in NY at $226 million, and second to the YSL sale of $443 million internationally), the rest of the Christie's sale suffered with high buy in rates and little interest. Sotheby's on the other hand had no featured collections, but still seems to have come out with a stronger selection of art for collectors.

Gleadell reports

The six most expensive works, all by either Picasso or Giacometti, had been secured for sale with the guarantee that they would be bought by third parties for a minimum, undisclosed price. In four cases, prices exceeded estimates and together they realised $161 million, almost half the value of Christie’s main, 69-lot sale. The only 19th-century work to shine was a more conventional, realist depiction of absinthe drinkers by Jean-François Raffaelli, which sold to the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco for a quadruple-estimate record $3 million.

While the Brody collection was 100 per cent sold, Christie’s came down to earth in a mixed-owner sale in which more than one third of lots went unsold. Among these was a trio of sub-standard works by the racy Fauvist painter Kees van Dongen which carried over-optimistic, boom-time estimates in the millions; and Fertility, one of Edvard Munch’s less desirable bucolic scenes, on which Christie’s had rashly placed a potentially record-breaking estimate of up to $35 million.

Although Sotheby’s had no big single-owner collection to sell, it did better than Christie’s with works from various sources, finding buyers for all but seven of 57 lots.

Asian buying was to the fore, emphasising the global nature of this market, with a Modigliani portrait going to a Japanese buyer for $13.8 million, and an atmospheric landscape by Monet heading east for $15 million. One Chinese buyer bought an early Impressionist view of the Seine by Monet for $6.2 million, and also paid a record $5.7 million for an early Surrealist landscape, Spectre du Soir sur la Plage, by Dalí.

To read the full Telegraph article, click HERE.