Christie's Contemporary Art Head to Step Down

It certainly has been a year of changes in the executive ranks at many auction houses. The Wall Street Journal has an article which continues the trend with the head of Christie's contemporary art leaving to partner in an art gallery.  Brett Gorvy has worked with Christie's for 23 years, and will leave at the end of the year.

The Wall Street Journal reports

The top contemporary-art executive at Christie’s is stepping down. Brett Gorvy, the longtime chairman and international head of Christie’s postwar and contemporary art, said Wednesday he is leaving the auction house to work as an art dealer.

Mr. Gorvy is a 23-year veteran of Christie’s who sat on its board and helped the house dominate the industry for the past decade—a position he bolstered by mounting ever-bigger sales of newer art with ballooning price tags to match. In a realm where billionaire art sellers demand huge profits and wary bidders seek safe bets and bargains, Mr. Gorvy excelled at playing the reassuring conductor, using hushed tones to convince both groups that he alone could accurately pinpoint the market value of a Lucian Freud or an Andy Warhol.

Mr. Gorvy, in a statement, described his decision to leave at year’s end as “difficult” but said he plans to continue working on a few projects with Christie’s next year as an advisor. He is also teaming up with New York dealer Dominique Lévy to form a gallery partnership called Lévy Gorvy. His move follows a stream of high-profile departures of auction executives in the past year as the world’s major houses grapple with a contracting art market.

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Christie’s said discussions about renewing Mr. Gorvy’s contract took place over several months, with Mr. Gorvy ultimately deciding to leave. Cat Manson, a Christie’s spokeswoman, said the company doesn’t plan to name a successor, preferring to rely on its current team as well as a few recent hires like Alex Rotter, a contemporary expert whom Christie’s wooed away from Sotheby’s in June. Mr. Rotter starts at Christie’s in March.

Mr. Gorvy, who was born in South Africa, moved to London and studied journalism before joining Christie’s in 1993. Back then, the art market was still recovering from a recent market crash and contemporary art was deemed speculative compared with older mainstay categories like old masters or impressionism. But as he climbed the ranks, moving to New York in 2000 to become deputy chairman of Christie’s Americas, he started keeping a revolving list of collectors who he said could afford to spend $50 million or more on a single work of art—and he set out to persuade each one of themto take a closer look at contemporary art, or pieces created after 1945.

At the outset, most of the collectors on his list were in their 70s and worked for major corporations, he said in an earlier interview. As of last year, his list included the names of 141 people, most in their 40s and 50s and many self-made billionaires. At least 26 people on his list were new collectors from Asia. Mr. Gorvy’s knack for cultivating these collectors and helping them push up values for living artists helped Christie’s dominate contemporary-art sales for the past decade—besting rivals Sotheby’s and Phillips. In 2004, one of his sales broke the $100 million barrier for the first time. Last year, he helped organize a mixed-category sale of older and newer art that totaled $706 million, the biggest auction to date.

In that 2015 sale, he fielded the nearly $180 million winning bid for a Pablo Picasso, 1955’s “Women of Algiers (Version O).” Two years before that, he was on the phone with casino magnate Elaine Wynn when she outbid several rivals to win a $142.4 million Francis Bacon from 1969, “Three Studies of Lucian Freud.”

Art-market values peaked in spring 2015 when Mr. Gorvy fielded that nearly $180 million Picasso bid, but sales and art values have fallen off gradually ever since. Dealers say collectors eyeing broader economic uncertainties have grown wary, preferring to hang onto their prized pieces rather than risk putting them up at auction.


Last year, Christie’s sales of contemporary art fell 20% to $2.2 billion, a surprising-at-the-time turnabout for a house that had staked its reputation on its ability to woo new global collectors to bid up works by living artists. During the first half of this year, contemporary art sales at Christie’s took another hit as its $788 million in auction sales for the period represented a 45% drop from the year before.

Jussi Pylkkanen, Christie’s chief auctioneer, praised Mr. Gorvy’s “amazing affinity for art,” adding that “his attention to detail is second to none.”

Source: The Wall Street Journal