Canadian Art Tastes Changing?

Ben Kaplan recently wrote an article on the Canadian art market in the National Post.  Kaplan reports that market sector growth is changing, shifting away from the Group of Seven and early 20th century Canadian art to more interest a value growth in post war and contemporary work.

Kaplan reports

If the recently wrapped fall art house auction season revealed any great trend, it’s that a Group of Seven painting, regardless of artistic merit, is no longer guaranteed to fetch jaw-dropping sales.

“I don’t want to point fingers, but one of our competitors featured a Lawren Harris Arctic sketch on their front cover catalogue and it failed to sell,” says Geoffrey Joyner, president of Joyner Canadian Fine Art and a veteran with 42 years of auction house experience. “We found not a great number of Group of Seven paintings on offer and those being offered weren’t of the best quality.”

This auction season, which concluded late last week, produced many impressive sales, including an Alex Colville painting that fetched $1.1-million at Heffel Fine Art Auction House and Wind Clouds, a painting by Group of Seven artist J.E.H. MacDonald, which sold for $589,000 last Tuesday at Sotheby’s. While there were paintings that sold for impressive figures — including Orchestra Chairs, an 1892 painting by Paul Peel, which was sold by Joyner for $413,000 — the way forward this May seems to be with works by post-war artists, and less with the Group of Seven.

“Within 10 years, the excitement we’re experiencing now when a living artist breaks that million-dollar threshold will not exactly be commonplace, but will not have that ‘wow’ factor,” says David Heffel, president of Heffel Fine Art, adding that not only is the Harris painting on his company’s catalogue already “virtually sold,” but that Heffel also holds all 10 of the largest sales in Canadian art history. “The future of our market is maturing post-war contemporary artists. It’s a trend based on attrition and matches what we’ve seen in the U.S.”

Click HERE to read the full National Post article.