I recently spoke to an art dealer who was unable to get out of New York before the snowstorm two weeks ago, and decided to get on the next plane to London as soon as JFK was open again. If he was going to miss out on a few days of sun and action in Los Angeles, where the art world had flocked for Frieze, he figured he might as well get a head start on the London auctions.

He found a surprising number of American and European dealers already there, along with several important art advisors. They were eager to talk about what was on offer—and, if they didn’t get what they were looking for in the auctions, they were keen to talk about what they could source for clients from the private side. This dealer cautioned that the private market for historical artworks from desirable names has not been as suppressed as the weak auction numbers over the last few years might’ve suggested, but he was mainly impressed at the sea change in the mood in London. He summed it up for me when he said, “It felt alive!”

London’s central role in the market has been diminished in recent years for a welter of reasons too complex to tease out here. But a truly healthy art market needs to be diversified and distributed, and the success of these sales—totals were up more than 50 percent at Sotheby’s, and more than double at Christie’s, which holds only two sales cycles a year in London compared to Sotheby’s three—suggests that the buyers are finally coming back. The art market may be once again exerting some centrifugal force, even if the timing seems surprising.

I know what you’re thinking: The United States and Israel have launched a war in Iran, the consequences of which could be destabilizing to the Middle East and the world economy. (Yes, that’s meant to be an understatement.) So why the hell are a bunch of rich people spending more than $550 million on art over the course of a few days in March?

Well, this kind of behavior is hardly unprecedented. The day Lehman Brothers went bankrupt, Damien Hirst held an auction at Sotheby’s that grossed $200 million. Nearly two decades later, the rich are so much richer. The U.S. has seen a surge in its number of billionaires, and as I noted in a recent email, it’s actually surprising we haven’t seen more money spent on art. When the world gets scary, we’re usually reminded that rich people with strong balance sheets can be greedy at the same time that others are fearful. More to the point, art tends to be bought with money already made, not money one hopes to make.

Taking it one step further, art buying—especially for historical art, which is what everyone was getting in London—is often a reaction to destabilizing change. Great works of art are talismans of creativity and achievement from the past, and owning them is a reminder that better days will come again. But they also give buyers a sense of power and protection when they feel vulnerable. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t feel vulnerable right now.

Before the bombs started falling last Sunday, we had already begun to see momentum building in the art market. In the months leading up to their London sales, Christie’s Katharine Arnold, who has been working with a handful of collectors in their early 40s, was making calls to secure property while fielding interest for the works that the house was previewing. When I asked her whether she was surprised by the strength of demand in last week’s sales, she said there had been plenty of signs. “I felt the preamble,” she told me, which gave her a premonition of “all the energy that was expended this week.”

The big question is whether it was the property offered, or a change in market mood, that loosened so many purse strings. I’m told the room was packed with some 400 people for the evening sale, a big crowd for a relatively small space that has been pretty sparse in recent years. For their part, Sotheby’s Tom Eddison and Ottilie Windsor told me the success was the result of several factors: the art, a successful traveling exhibition, more Americans in town, new clients bidding (and winning!) works, and a great deal more bidding in the room. “We felt such positivity this week,” Windsor told me.

Did they all come for the small but extremely valuable group of works from the collection of Joe Lewis? These included two paintings by Lucien Freud, a selfie by Francis Bacon, and a very important painting by Leon Kossoff. The Freuds were a mixed bag, but still sold reasonably well. The Bacon doubled the estimate, but sold for a price in line with these small self-portraits, some of which have achieved prices 50 percent higher than the still-solid $21.6 million paid last week. But the Kossoff really electrified the room: 10 bidders pushed it to $7 million, or four times the previous high auction price for the artist. The collection overall brought in $48 million.

There was also a benefit sale for the Royal Academy, with two lots in the evening sale and nine in the day sale, which were donated by artists to support the institution. The sale brought in $2.6 million, with works by Sean Scully and El Anatsui that each made around $1 million. Batia Ofer, the chair of the Royal Academy Trust, was also in the room bidding on other works.

Sotheby’s also held a sale of David Hockney iPad drawings, which are editioned works but still quite valuable. All 16 sold, for a total of $6.1 million—double the aggregate estimate for the sale.

At Christie’s, the sales were also anchored by a prominent collection, this one from Roger and Josette Vanthournout, which totaled $65 million. The top lots in that sale were a 1939 Pablo Picasso that had six phone bidders and sold for nearly twice the £3 million estimate, a Henry Moore sculpture, a Jean Dubuffet that exceeded the estimate range, and two paintings that sold solidly within the estimates by René Magritte and Lucio Fontana.

The various-owners evening sale saw the last remaining cast of Henry Moore’s King and Queen sell for $35 million and set a new record for the artist. Two Gerhard Richter paintings, a landscape and an abstract, performed very well, both making prices around $10 million. A Wassily Kandinsky painting that was bought in 2018 for $20.6 million resold to a third-party guarantor for $17 million, a reminder that the market strength being exhibited is not indiscriminate. On the positive side for Christie’s, a 1961 Cy Twombly Untitled (Rome) painting had solid bidding to sell for $5.4 million, demonstrating the growing demand in the Twombly market. (I also hear the Gund “Roma” work with a $40 million estimate now has a third-party guarantor, another good sign.)

In the surrealism sale, a small Joan Miró from 1949 sold for $6.5 million after nine phone bidders chased it along with advisor Jussi Pylkkänen in the room. A small Dorothea Tanning, Children’s Games, from 1942, sold for nearly $6.4 million, setting a record and obliterating the estimate. Almost as impressive were the record set for the Czech artist Toyen, whose Le devenir de la liberté, from 1946, sold for $5 million; the nearly $5.9 million paid for Paul Delvaux’s La Ville lunaire, from 1944; and the sale of a 1929 Picasso, Figure, that was estimated at less than $1 million but sold for more than $4 million.

Since we’re speaking of Picasso, let me also point out that Christie’s day sale of impressionist and modern art and works on paper was a marvel. The sale totaled $25 million—exceeding the postwar and contemporary day sale, which brought in $20.6 million. The top lot there was another Picasso that had been estimated well below a million dollars but sold for $2.2 million. But the strong performance for these lots went far beyond. This is hardly what anyone would call “blue-chip” work—yes, the sale featured big names, but these were minor pieces. If you want evidence of a “flight to quality” or a turn of the wheel toward historical works, this is definitely it.

We’re going to have to leave it there for today. I’ve run out of space. But I’ll have more to say about the London sales on Wednesday in the Inner Circle. Upgrade to join me there.

Until then,

M