A Billion Dollars Worth of Art

Over the past several weeks we have seen the NY fall art sales take center stage and bring a record breaking $1 billion in sales.  The contemporary sectors did much better than impressionists, but at the end of the sales, the total dollar figures were large and impressive.

The Telegraph takes a look at the sales

History was made in New York last week when, against a gloomy economic backdrop, a series of post-war and contemporary art auctions fetched over one billion dollars ($1.079 billion or £680 million to be precise) for the first time. Who would have guessed that, when the equivalent sales in the spring of 2009 plunged to $213 million, such a peak would have been reached within three and a half years? As the economist Clare McAndrew told The Daily Telegraph, the world’s super-rich may have decided to put their excess cash into art because they have nowhere else to invest it. But this doesn’t explain last week on its own.

With prices for the world’s top living artist, Gerhard Richter, finally levelling out, it was the earlier generations of post-war American artists that were in the driving seat. Abstract Expressionist and Pop have always been the rock on which the New York contemporary sales are based, but this time there was a greater supply than usual – much straight from collections that had been formed 40 or 50 years ago.

This could be described as the generation factor, as collectors with foresight reach a certain age and decide to sell. A small drip painting by Jackson Pollock, which sold for a record $40.4 million, was part of a collection of works by Abstract Expressionist artists that were bought in the early Seventies by Sidney and Dorothy Kohl, American collectors who are now in their eighties. The collection realised more than $100 million bringing further records for Hans Hoffman ($4.6 million) and Arshile Gorky ($6.8 million).

Over the long term, works by major post-war artists have seen huge increases in value – the enticement-to-sell factor. Mark Rothko’s No1 (Royal Red and Blue) had reportedly been bought for less than $500,000 in 1982 and sold last week for $75 million. A small wire sculpture of a policeman, made in 1928 by Alexander Calder, had been bought in 1995 for $107,000 and sold for $4.2 million.

Source: The Telegraph