Recession? What recession? Stunning prices in last week’s sales by the two leading London auction houses confirm that any recession there may have been is well and truly over as we go into a new year.

Pride of place, of course, must go to the life-size Giacometti Walking Man sculpture at Sotheby’s, which two determined rivals bid up in an eight-minute duel to a staggering £65m, way above the estimate of about £12m-£18m, hardly to be explained away by the fact that no figure of this scale had come to market for more than 20 years. In US$ terms, a price of $104.3m (which, unlike estimates, includes buyer’s premium and any other charges) just topped the $104.2m for Picasso’s Garcon a la Pipe at Sotheby's in New York in 2004, previously the highest price ever recorded on an auction, though Sotheby’s points out that there have been private sales at significantly higher prices.
According to Wikipedia, the three top-priced known private sales were all between $135m-$140m, between June and November 2006, for paintings by Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Gustav Klimt, when the modern art bubble was close to bursting.
As expected, the other star of Sotheby's sale was a Klimt landscape, out of public sight since it was stolen by the Nazis. This, also estimated at £12m-£18m, fetched £26.9m. These two items propelled the gross to £147m, well above the top end of the estimate of £69m-£102m.

However, a third work estimated at £10m+, a Cezanne still life (est £10m-£15m) failed to find favour.

If Christie’s sale the night before was less glamorous, it was still a success. Highlight was £8.1m for a Picasso portrait of his second wife, Jacqueline, which had been estimated at £3m-£4m, followed by £7.1m for Kees van Dongen’s La Gitane (est £5m-£7m) and £6.4m for Natalia Goncharova’s Espagnole (est £4m-£6m). The evening sale grossed £66.7m, close to the top end of the estimate range of £48.3m-£68.1m.

Nor are these results a flash in the pan. Though auction sales globally fell by up to a third last year, with precipitous declines early in the year, a recovery was already apparent in New York last November.

Sotheby’s evening sale of Impressionist and modern art grossed $181.8m, against an estimate range of $115.3m-$163m, with five works fetching $10m+ and comparing with a gross for its comparable 2008 sale of $125m. Christie’s post-war and modern sale was less successful, grossing $74.2m, below the low estimate of $68.7m and with only 28 of 40 lots selling. However, Christie’s also sold the most expensive art item of the year, $74.9m for a Raphael drawing, a record for any work on paper.

And this may not be the end. “You only need two individuals to take something to $104 million or more," Philip Hoffman, founder of the Fine Art Fund Group which claims more than a dozen billionaires among its clients, told Reuters. I am confident we will break $104m in the next couple of years," he said.

Whatever happens to the broader economy, he said, there will always be super-wealthy individuals who look at the art world as a passionate collector and/or shrewd investor. And institutions and even governments are in the market for rare works of art to fill new museums and galleries, particularly in the Middle East.

Well, here’s hoping.


Picture credit: Photograph: Carl Court/AFP/Getty Images

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/feb/03/giacometti-statue-breaks-auction-record