It is starting to look as if a $100 million painting is now a new normal, and no longer has the impact and market buzz of just a few short years ago.
The Wall Street Journal looks at escalating prices and auction estimates and how the high costs are viewed by the art market.
The WSJ reports
Source: Wall Street JournalSales of trophy works such as a $450 million Leonardo da Vinci have auction houses rejiggering other artists’ price levels—and collectors’ expectations
By Kelly Crow
What’s the going rate for a masterpiece? As Sotheby’s , Christie’s and Phillips kick off a week of spring auctions Monday, the market for trophy art is in flux.
The historic sale of a $450 million Leonardo da Vinci painting last fall continues to shake up art values at the marketplace’s high end, as auctioneers seek to manage collectors’ expectations and recalibrate price levels for dozens of other blue-chip artists.
Until recently, $100 million was a gasp-inducing price for any work at auction. Six years ago, Sotheby’s New York saleroom erupted with shouts and applause when the house sold Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” for $119 million. Yet last week during Christie’s sale of the estate of Peggy and David Rockefeller, the packed room was silent as Pablo Picasso’s “Young Girl with a Flower Basket”—which had a $100 million estimate—sold for $115 million after a single telephone bid.
Afterward, dealers said it was unclear whether the lackluster bidding hinged on the Picasso’s dour subject matter—a poor, nude girl—or reflected an audience that has grown accustomed to seeing, and paying, nine-figure prices for art. “Maybe $100 million is the new $10 million,” said dealer Larry Gagosian.
Christie’s said the Rockefeller family was pleased by the Picasso price, adding that the estate sale totaled $832.6 million overall, a sum that fell short of predictions it might top $1 billion yet surpassed its own estimates.
Simon Shaw, Sotheby’s co-head of impressionist and modern art world-wide, said, “It’s becoming more and more difficult to price these masterpieces because people focus so much on them but only a few people in the world wind up competing for them.”
On Monday, Sotheby’s will need to persuade a few of the world’s roughly 1,500 billionaires to chase after its priciest offering: Amedeo Modigliani’s “Reclining Nude,” which it expects to sell for at least $150 million, the highest estimated price an auction house has ever asked for a work of art. The 1917 portrait depicts a nude brunette looking languidly over her shoulder as she lounges on disheveled sheets. It’s the largest example in a series of at least 35 portraits of nude models that Modigliani painted for his dealer between 1916 and 1919. This one, which has a hunter-green background, is being sold by Irish horse breeder John Magnier, who paid Christie’s $26.9 million for it in 2003. Bloomberg identified Mr. Magnier as the seller.
Mr. Shaw said Sotheby’s strategically priced “Reclining Nude” at $150 million so that it looked like a “great value” compared with a smaller Modigliani nude from this same series that Christie’s sold for $170.4 million three years ago. That work had an asking price around $100 million. Sotheby’s also found an outside investor who has pledged to buy the work if no one else steps up during the sale. That is a risk-offsetting maneuver that aims to reassure the seller but can also damp competition because rivals know they will need to outbid the investor to win the work. (Christie’s $115 million Picasso sold to its so-called guarantor.)
Overall, the houses will try to sell at least $1.7 billion worth of impressionist, modern and contemporary art during this series. Other potential trophy works to watch:
Christie’s reset the record for this Romanian sculptor last May when it sold “Sleeping Muse” for $57.4 million. On Tuesday, it will ask around $70 million for “Portrait of a Young Sophisticated Girl (Portrait of Nancy Cunard),” a 1932 work of polished bronze and marble that pays homage to the shipping heiress. The artist created the work in 1932. Christie’s said he sold it in 1955 when an American couple, Frederick and Elizabeth Stafford, stopped by his Paris studio while on vacation. The couple paid $5,000 and later lent it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for four decades. Now, their children are selling the work.
At age 80, this British-born painter is hotter than ever. The Metropolitan Museum of Art just closed a retrospective of his colorful landscapes and portraits, and earlier this month, another Hockney show, “82 Portrait and 1 Still-Life,” opened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Sotheby’s hopes to capitalize on the attention to break the artist’s $11.7 million auction record, set two years ago with “Woldgate Woods, 24, 25 and 26 October, 2006,” a forest scene. On Wednesday, Sotheby’s estimates it will sell “Pacific Coast Highway and Santa Monica,” a rainbow-colored mountain vista from 1990 for at least $20 million.
This Los Angeles artist’s feathery, colorful paintings of masks have sold for as much as $16.8 million at auction. Phillips plans to test another aspect of Mr. Grotjahn’s market Thursday by offering one of his lesser-known sculptures, “Untitled (Free Standing Large Garden Sculpture Mask M24.g).” Mr. Grotjahn started experimenting with sculpture in 2010, and deputy chairman Jean-Paul Engelen said this 2014 work is a “mask you can walk around.” Asking price: $500,000.
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