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Welcome back to Wall Power’s Inner Circle. I’m Marion
Maneker.
If you’ve been following my coverage of the Old Masters sales, you know that I’ve been trying to make sense of the new mood in that market. The success of the Old Masters auctions earlier this month piqued my interest, so I was eager to speak to David Pollack and Calvine Harvey, who lead Sotheby’s Old Masters department in New York. A category once driven by dealers and scholarship has become far more eclectic and open to collectors who
know what they like and aren’t afraid to buy it. Up top, we have a few lots announced by Bonhams for their London sales next week. And Jen Rubio joins the board of the Met in New York.
Mentioned in this issue: David Pollack, Calvine Harvey, Botticelli, Corneille de Lyon, Sarah Lucas, Alighiero Boetti, Henri Le Sidaner,
Frank Auerbach, Jennifer Rubio, Stewart Butterfield, and many more…
Here we go…
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- Sarah Lucas leads Bonhams sale in London: March 5 will be a very busy day in the auction business in London. The three major houses are all holding sales, including Christie’s and Phillips’s evening sales of modern and contemporary art. Bonhams will also hold a sale that day, to be led by a large Sarah Lucas bronze from her 2015 Venice Biennale pavilion. The more than 12-foot-tall, bright yellow work, estimated at
£300,000, is inspired by FIFA and titled Gold Cup Maradona. It’s being sold alongside an Alighiero Boetti “biro” work, Mettere i verbi all’infinito, from 1978, which is estimated at £200,000, and Frank Auerbach’s Head of Catherine Lampert, painted in 1996, estimated at the same price. A 1931 Henri Le Sidaner, Les arbres sur la rive, Quimperlé, is estimated at £150,000.
- Jen Rubio becomes a trustee at the Met: The Metropolitan Museum of Art issued a press release this morning announcing that Jennifer Rubio has been elected a trustee of the museum. Rubio, who is best known as the co-founder of the luggage company Away, is married to Slack co-founder Stewart Butterfield. She was previously on the board of the Whitney, and is a member of the Met’s Chairman’s Council and a Friend of the Costume Institute.
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Now, let’s talk about the changing Old Masters market…
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The Old Masters market has a new sense of energy and opportunity, with
a recent migration of contemporary collectors to the category and a savvy auction house highlighting new reasons to love old paintings.
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The Old Masters market seems to be changing on both the buyer’s and seller’s side.
There’s an influx of modern and contemporary collectors who are confident in their ability to judge a work, and auction houses are emphasizing pieces with strong, resonant imagery pitched toward collectors’ new tastes. The results seem to validate these moves—Sotheby’s achieved an 86 percent sell-through rate in this month’s Part II sales (the equivalent of day sales), in a category that used to routinely accept sell-through rates as low as 65 to 75 percent.
In fact, the house saw a 36 percent
increase in visitors to Old Masters week this year compared to last, and 40 percent of the buyers were new to the category. So I spoke to David Pollack, head of Sotheby’s Old Masters department in New York, and Calvine Harvey, its director of international strategy, about their approach to the sales, how they took advantage of their new space in the Breuer Building, and what it means to work with an ever-diminishing supply of Old Masters art. As always, this
conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
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Marion Maneker: You’re coming off a very successful
season, and I got the sense that you approached it in a slightly different way. How so?
David Pollack: As far as managing the sales, it’s certainly true that irrevocable bids have trickled down to us in an ever-increasing way. But I think what last week showed is that there is a lot of depth in the market. For instance, our Part II sale had an 85 percent sell-through rate, and we’re really never doing irrevocable bids there. So that was bidding in the more traditional
sense.
As for how we put together the sale, we look for the same things every year. The fundamental difference between us and a contemporary department is that our supply is fixed and diminishing. We’re very driven by what’s presented to us. We’re proactive in terms of great, single objects—but the volume of what we sell is a very different dynamic. We’re always trying to be conservative with estimates, always trying to understand what the market wants. And we’re being tighter in our Part
I sales—when a certain look is doing better than others, we at least try to populate our Part I sales with those types of images.
Calvine Harvey: We also had a whole new space to play with. When we started thinking about selling at the Breuer, we looked at how differently we’d be able to hang our paintings. We mixed our Part I and Part II sales, which is something we didn’t do at York Avenue. In the Breuer, no picture is hidden in the back by the bathroom. Every painting looked
great, every wall felt highlighted. It really lends itself to selling a full sale, and that was a great thing for us.
Pollack: On the heels of what [the Lauder sale] looked like, people were curious to see how that would translate to Old Masters. We had a 36 percent year-on-year increase in visitors for Old Masters week. That’s significant, and we felt it.
Harvey: And 40 percent of the buyers were new to the category. That’s a lot of people
jumping into categories they hadn’t participated in before.
Are those people new art buyers, or just new to the category? And how are they behaving?
Harvey: I would say new to the category. And what’s great—and important— is that they’re activating all up and down the market and across different areas. You have contemporary collectors who may be used to spending $2 million in their usual category, but they’ll dip a toe in and buy a few smaller things in
the day sale and see if they like living with them. Then you have the masterpiece buyers who come from other categories at the top, top level. What we saw this season was really sprinkled down from that—people coming in and exploring all areas.
Pollack: I agree with Calvine. It’s not a monolith. You have some people who say, “I want a Botticelli,” and they’ll wait for one—whether it’s 100 percent by him, or just has the look—so you see a rising tide in that
entire market for those kinds of brand names. But you also have those who are very image-driven. That’s why you see two very seasoned collectors going after an anonymous painting—this Franco-Flemish picture we’re all trying to understand. Those were two people who knew about Old Masters, who collected Old Masters, and said, “I love it. I know this kind of image doesn’t come up very often, and I want it.” Attribution mattered much less than the image itself.
Right. You’re referring
to the Corneille de Lyon painting that’s no longer formally attributed to him, which sold for $2.3 million—whereas the attributed Corneille de Lyon painting in the same sale sold for about $408,000. Normally, the work that’s no longer attributed would be less valuable.
Pollack: That’s one of the eccentricities of the Old Masters market. Sometimes, comps can limit the upside or downside performance of an object. There are so many more prices for a fully attributed
Corneille de Lyon, as opposed to, What is a beautiful, desirable image, which is old, worth? That’s a harder question to answer. And when the stars align for two or three collectors saying, “It’s worth what I’m prepared to pay”—that’s where you see those numbers go.
Part of the fun of collecting is learning and going deep on these subjects after you buy—or prepare to buy—something. Are the collectors responding to that side of it, or are they just happy
you’ve done their homework?
Harvey: For the most part, they jump right in. They get excited about things, and we saw that this week. They come back multiple times. They look at things off the wall, under the black light. They do their research. They run over to the Met and look at the other one. I think for the most part, new and seasoned collectors enjoy that part of the process. That’s what makes the week fun.
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“An
Exciting Direction for Everyone”
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Are people more resigned to it being a different market, and more willing to accept those
lower estimates?
Harvey: It’s always a conversation, and often a long one. But generally, they understand that in this market, you can’t over-gun it. People are really price-sensitive. While we may get some pushback heading into next season, you have to remind them to look at the estimates that created those results, not just where things landed—because the ones that started lower got people excited and interested. It’s an argument we make constantly, and this is a lot
of what we do. But I think people tend to listen. The reality is that in the Old Masters market, people understand that it’s pretty slow and steady. No one’s buying an Old Master and expecting to flip it in two years for three times the price the way they might in the contemporary market.
Pollack: Even in the most financialized of conversations—which often involve irrevocable bids—I’m very clear when I’m talking to people: Do not do this unless you want to own it, because
there’s a chance you will. Of course, there are some people who want to play the game and gamble a bit. But by and large, people that are placing irrevocable bids in our category are collectors.
David, as you alluded to earlier, your category has a supply constraint. You know where a lot of this material is, based on your records and previous sales. When you see certain types of images working, can you start shaping your sales around what the underbidders were interested
in?
Pollack: Of course. We wouldn’t be doing our jobs properly if we weren’t making certain clients aware of what they have. In obvious cases, we’ll be targeting, giving advice, updating appraisals, and letting people know that now is as good a time as any to trigger a discretionary sale.
What else should we know about how you see this category evolving?
Pollack: The days of going into a New York apartment and seeing only Dutch
17th century painting mixed with only 18th century furniture—people just aren’t living that way anymore. We, the sellers, have to recognize that. If we try to force that on people, it’s just not going to work. So we are responding to what we see, which is people living eclectically. There are no more rules. We have to lean into our strengths: We are a multiplatform, multidepartment company that can put a fine portrait into an Old Masters sale. How many other places can do that? We have to
recognize the realities and trends, and embrace them. And I think now that we’re doing that, we’ll see good things.
Harvey: It’s refreshing. Isn’t it more fun to walk into a home and see someone’s eye in that way—that encapsulates some 20th century things and some 18th century things, and maybe a fine portrait? I think it’s an exciting direction for everyone in the art market.
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I just want to thank Curtis Rowser for his help elevating this conversation into
its final form. I’ll be back on Friday with my Frieze Los Angeles report.
Until then,
M
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