Results: Sotheby's London Impressionist & Modern Evening Sale

First, please accept my apologies for misspelling Edouard Manet's name in the title of yesterdays post.  As many readers of the AW Blog know, I am a bit of a dyslexic typist, and I also have a hard time seeing my errors, and I also miss some of the spell check signals, especially when text is mixed with some HTML code.  Occasionally I  rush to get a post up and fail to proof at all, I just type it and hit publish.  In any event, please dont hold my typing and spell checking against and me, and I hope you find the blog worthwhile.

Now, on to the Sotheby's London Evening Sales results.  I  believe pre sale expectations were higher for this sale than the actual results.  Yes, as I posted yesterday, the Manet sold for a record price, but it just crossed the low end of the estimate including buyers premium at $33.1 million.  Interesting comment in Carol Vogel's NY Times piece stating the Manet just crossing the low estimate lowered enthusiasm for the rest of the sale (see her commentary below). The sale offered 51 lots, and only 35 sold for a sell through rate of only 68.6%.  Given the success of earlier sales, I think many thought the sale would be stronger.  It totaled $165.3 million. The sale did fall within the pre sale estimates of $148.4 million to $217.5 million, and given the high bought in rate, those items that sold, did well, yet many items did not and the sale did not continue with the strength seen earlier in the year.

Sothebys stated

Tonight’s much-anticipated sale of Impressionist and Modern Art at Sotheby’s in London brought a within-estimate total of £112,101,350 / $165,282,230 / €134,409,672. Three works sold for more than £10 million, only the second time
this has happened in London auction history1: Edouard Manet’s museum-quality masterpiece.

Self Portrait with a Palette sold for £22,441,250 ($33,087,379 / €26,907,089), setting a new auction record for the artist; André Derain’s Arbres à Collioure, from the Vollard trove, made £16,281,250 ($24,005,075/€19,521,241), double the previous record for the artist and a record for any Fauve painting at auction; and Henri Matisse’s Odalisques jouant aux dames brought £11,801,250 /$17,399,763 / €14,149,715. The sale attracted buyers from no fewer than 13 countries; of the lots sold, over 50% achieved prices in excess of the high estimate; and the average lot value for the works sold reached an exceptional £3.2 million. The sum achieved
tonight brings the total of Impressionist & Modern Art sold by Sotheby’s London so far in 2010 to an unprecedented £276 million.

Commenting on tonight’s sale, Melanie Clore, Co-Chairman of Impressionist & Modern Art, Sotheby’s Worldwide, said: “The strong results achieved this evening demonstrate the strength of the international demand for top-quality works. To sell three works for over £10 million – for the second time in our sales in London in the last six months - is testimony not only to the vitality of the Impressionist and Modern Art market but also to the pivotal role that London plays within the
international auction market.”

Carol Vogel summed the sale up in the title of her NY Times review, A Lackluster Art Auction in London. Vogel states

Given the high prices paid at auction in recent months, the painting — one of only two self-portraits painted by the French master, which Sotheby’s had been heavily promoting — had been hoped to fetch as much as $43.4 million. Instead, it seemed for several tense moments on the verge of not selling at all, as Henry Wyndham, the chairman of Sotheby’s Europe and the evening’s auctioneer, started bidding to a hushed salesroom. Finally, when he reached 20 million pounds, or $29.48 million, Franck Giraud, a private dealer based in New York, made what seemed like the only offer. After the sale, Mr. Giraud declined to say for whom he was bidding.

“The Manet put a damper on the evening,” said Richard L. Feigen, another New York dealer, adding that the painting was not well suited to being sold at auction. “It was a great picture, but he’s not an auction artist,” Mr. Feigen said; the work was too intellectual to have the commercial appeal of paintings and sculptures by Picasso, Giacometti and Modigliani that have brought record-breaking prices over the last few months. (Nevertheless, the self-portrait did manage to set a record for Manet at auction, beating the $26.4 million paid for another painting by the artist at Christie’s in New York in 1989.)

To read the NY Times article, click HERE.