A 1 Billion Dollar Fall Season

As many appraisers know, last week NY held several high profile contemporary art auctions, including sales at Sotheby's Christie's and Phillips, and ended most the NY sales fall season of contemporary, modern and impressionist sales.  According to Kelly Crow writing for the Wall Street Journal Christie's led the group with sales of $682 million, followed by Sotheby's at $535 million and Phillips at $143 million.  Crow notes the results are similar to the earlier spring sales and means either prices have peaked, or have settled into a comfort zone.  In either event, after strong early part of the year followed by a short period of concern over the summer and early fall the contemporary market appears to have stabilized at a relatively strong level.

Crow reports

This round of Impressionist, modern and contemporary art sales also contained 40% more works than last fall's sale, and the market passably absorbed the boosted volume: Around 68% of the 2,266 offered works sold. But the market remains far from its fever peak of three years ago, when bidders regularly paid triple the asking prices for even mediocre or untested artworks.

This time around, bidders were at least willing to compete for pieces at a wider variety of price levels, rather than holding out for the usual trophies. This season's included Amedeo Modigliani's cranberry-colored "Nude Sitting on a Sofa (The Beautiful Romanian)," which Sotheby's sold for $68.9 million on Nov. 2. Top honors at Christie's went to Henri Matisse's hard-edged bronze, "Back IV," which sold the following day for $48.8 million.

Phillips de Pury & Co., a boutique auction house with a new Park Avenue showroom, sold $143 million of contemporary art—including the fall sales' priciest piece of postwar art: Andy Warhol's $63.4 million "Men in Her Life," a 1962 image of Elizabeth Taylor flanked by former flames.

To read the full WSJ article, click HERE.