The Art Market: New records for Christie’s

Murakami’s ‘Oval Buddha Silver’ in Versailles

After last week’s sales of Impressionist and Modern art fell well short of the admittedly over-hyped expectations, all eyes were on the Contemporary art sales this week. The results at Sotheby’s and Christie’s were reassuringly solid, with both houses achieving results within their targets and setting a number of new price highs. Sotheby’s evening sale on Monday totalled £41m with a very respectable 83 per cent sold by lot, while Christie’s slightly larger sale (62 v 53 lots) on Wednesday raised £45.6m with 84 per cent sold by volume. At both sales buyers were generally wary of paying much over estimate, but Christie’s achieved six new records, including £1.9m for Chris Ofili’s “Orgena” (1998) and £1.8m for Boetti’s 1989 “Mappa”. At Sotheby’s, the Indian artist Bharti Kher’s bindi-encrusted elephant made a new record at £993,250, although it fell short of its top estimate. However, Phillips de Pury’s evening sale on Tuesday was feeble. With a weak catalogue, it made a paltry £3.9m, half its low pre-sale estimate.

It’s Old Master week in London with auctions and dealer events. Celebrating its 10th anniversary this year, “Master Drawings London” groups 20 dealers, all but one dotted around Mayfair and St James’s and starts on Saturday, ending on Friday July 9. All the participants (list at www.masterdrawingsinlondon.com) are open Sunday afternoon. Lowell Libson has a charming drawing of a peacock by Constable (“in the low £20,000s,” says Libson). While most of the exhibitors are London-based, Hill-Stone has come from New York and José de la Mano from Madrid. “This is all about accessibility. If you are an auction buyer, there are just the two sales seasons to buy in. This event shows collectors that we are here all the year round, and we can show visitors what we do and they can get a feel for us,” says Libson.

Running alongside Master Drawings week, and certainly adding bags of synergy, is the Master Paintings event held on the same dates and times (list at www.masterpaintingsweek.co.uk). It is now in its second year and groups 25 of London’s top specialists. Some recent headline-grabbing works will be on show, among them the Van Dyck “Self Portrait” of 1640 which sold earlier this year at Christie’s for £8.3m to the Milwaukee dealer Alfred Bader in association with Londoner Philip Mould (who is now exhibiting it). Johnny van Haeften is showing Frans Francken the Younger’s “Mankind’s Eternal Dilemma – the Choice between Vice and Virtue,” for which he paid a hefty €7.2m in Vienna in April, the highest price ever paid at auction in Austria (it’s now tagged at £9.5m).

As for the auctions, aristocratic provenances are splashed all over the week. Christie’s Tuesday sale has an upper target of £50m for 68 lots, and includes two paintings from Princess Diana’s family home Althorp: Rubens’ “A Commander being Armed for Battle” is looking for £8m-£12m, while Guercino’s “King David” hopes for £5m-£8m. And, much further down the price scale, there is plenty of opportunity to buy something with the same patrician provenance: gleanings from Althorp’s attics, stables and storerooms are being sold in a sprawling £1m sale at Christie’s South Kensington on Wednesday and Thursday. The 745 lots include “four English butlers’ trays, late 18th-19th century, £500-£800”, and more than a dozen horse-drawn carriages, from a £20,000 barouche to a £3,000 phaeton. Meanwhile, Sotheby’s is offering a painting with an equally copper-bottomed provenance: Turner’s “Modern Rome Campo Vaccino”, (1839) from the Earl of Rosebery (est £12-£18m) appears on Wednesday in its evening sale, which could fetch up to £35m.

More and more foreign art dealers are setting up in Beijing, among them the Frenchman Hadrien de Montferrand, whose gallery specialises in works on paper. His summer exhibition focuses on 45 portraits by Chinese artists from 1955 to 1975, a period including the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution: this is the first time a foreign gallery has shown such works. “It was terribly difficult for artists during those upheavals,” says De Montferrand. “And it took me a long time to persuade them to trust in a foreign gallery and agree to let me show their work.” Prices range from €1,500 to €100,000. From Sunday until August 15.

The tiny, energy-rich Gulf state of Qatar has been much in the news, between the court case over the Chelsea Barracks site and a rumour, published in London’s Evening Standard, that it is seeking to buy Christie’s. (The auction house “doesn’t comment on speculation” – and Pinault’s holding company Artemis issued a denial.) Qatar’s royal family is a major art buyer, and some trade sources claim that Manet’s “Self Portrait with a Palette”, which sold for £22.4m last week to the New York dealer Franck Giraud, is destined for Doha (Giraud denies that he buys for Qatar). Meanwhile, in 2012 Doha will host a version of the Murakami exhibition that opens in Versailles this autumn (September 14-December 12). The Versailles show is partly funded by the Qatar Museums Authority but, says Murakami’s Parisian dealer Emmanuel Perrotin, “The Qatari show will be bigger, it will be a different concept, and shown in a splendid building” – but not, apparently, the Museum of Islamic Art that opened just 18 months ago.

Georgina Adam is editor-at-large of The Art Newspaper. This weekly column returns in September