The Art Market: 92 lots and a flop

Monet’s ‘Nymphéas’ (1914-1917), still in search of a good home

“It’s an amazingly strong market!” exclaimed London dealer Daniella Luxembourg as she exited Sotheby’s Impressionist and Modern art sale in London on Wednesday night. The brisk auction of just 35 lots made almost £97m with only three works unsold; the top lot, Schiele’s 1914 “Houses with Laundry (Suburb II)” scored the week’s highest price at £24.7m (est. £22m-£30m). But the painting was actually pre-sold even before it hit the auction block, as Sotheby’s had found an “irrevocable bidder” to guarantee to buy it. In the event, a second bidder, working through Sotheby’s specialist Mark Poltimore, bagged the painting, leading many to conclude that the buyer was Russian, as Poltimore works closely with that country.

However, more interest was focused on Christie’s sale the previous night, which boasted a doorstop catalogue of 92 lots, including 40 from the estate of the Swiss dealer Ernst Beyeler, being sold to benefit the Beyeler Foundation. In truth, the Beyeler holdings were uneven and buyers were particularly galvanised by the more personal works – for example, his fruitwood-and-walnut desk, which made £289,250, well over its £8,000-£12,000 estimate – and Picasso ceramics. A major flop was Monet’s “Nymphéas” (1914-1917), which was bought in at £15m with no bids in the room, well short of the excessive £17m-£24m estimate. But Picasso did well. Pre-sale interest had focused on the clunky 1936 “Jeune fille endormie” (est £9m-£12m), which had been given to the University of Sydney to sell to raise funds for medical research. It sold for £13.5m to Alan Hobart of Pyms Gallery, whose best-known client is furniture magnate Graham Kirkland. But a much better work, a portrait of Dora Maar, “Femme assise, robe bleue”, from 1936, really raised the saleroom temperature. Lots of hands shot up as it went under the hammer, and it zipped past its £4m-£8m estimate to make £17.96m, going to the Greek financier Dimitri Mavromatis. Christie’s sale fetched a within-estimate £140m, with the Beyeler material raising £44.7m, at the low end of expectations because of the failure of the Monet.

. . .

For years, rumours have buzzed that Qatar is trying to buy Christie’s, and the company has firmly squelched them at every opportunity. Now the Qatar Museums Authority (QMA) has hired Christie’s chairman Ed Dolman to sit on its board of trustees, and to be executive director in the office of Sheikha Mayassa Al Thani, the daughter of the emir of Qatar and a driving force in the country’s art collecting. Dolman’s brief is to buy art, oversee state collections and establish museums. “As well as museums in the country,” he tells me, “Qatar wants to develop cultural projects worldwide, linked to their investments, and we are looking to deliver a series of exciting projects in time for the 2022 World Cup.” Dolman is the second Christie’s staff member to leave for Doha: the QMA recently lured away the firm’s contemporary art specialist Jean-Paul Engelen to be its director of public programmes.

Qatar is the first of the Gulf states to open a stylish, starchitect-designed new museum, the Museum of Islamic Art by IM Pei, and is a major if secretive buyer in the field of modern and contemporary art. The state also has considerable holdings in photography, natural history, antiquities and other fields, thanks to Sheikh Saud Al Thani (a cousin of the emir), who built up these collections during a spending spree that ended in 2005. Sheikh Saud’s brother, Sheikh Hassan, is also a key buyer in the field of modern Arab and Middle Eastern art, and some of the collection he has built up is on display in the newly inaugurated Mathaf, the Arab Museum of Modern Art.

. . .

©Getty

Power trio Wendi Deng Murdoch, Newsweek editor Tina Brown and Dasha Zhukova

Power trio Dasha Zhukova, Wendi Deng Murdoch and Newsweek editor Tina Brown held an “intimate dinner” – for about 200 guests – during Art Basel last week, in honour of artist Christian Marclay. They used the occasion to boost Art.sy, the new art database that Zhukova and Murdoch are backing. On hand was Art.sy chief executive and techno-whizz Carter Cleveland (“our Mark Zuckerberg,” said Brown proudly, referring to the Facebook founder) to explain that “centuries ago” mainly only royalty had music, but that with the invention of radio, music was brought to the masses ... and that in the same way, Art.sy will increase art’s reach and expand the market. Dealers can sign up for free (and the likes of Pace, David Zwirner and Richard Feigen already have) but are grumbling about the 15 per cent commission Art.sy will take on sales. The venture has some powerful backers and advisors apart from Zhukova and Murdoch, including Larry Gagosian (present at the dinner with hedge-fund mogul Steve Cohen), Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and Google chairman Eric Schmidt. The site launches this autumn.

. . .

Swedish “activist” investor Peter Gyllenhammar has upped his holdings in London’s famed art-and-antiques emporium Mallett, which has reported losses for the past three years and did not pay a dividend in 2010. Gyllenhammar now has 23 per cent of the shares. Chief executive Giles Hutchinson Smith says: “We’re in friendly contact; he’s happy for us to continue to trade until we get into a more balanced position.” Mallett occupies a splendid building in Bond Street opposite Sotheby’s, but, says Hutchinson Smith, “rents are only going in one direction” and the firm is looking for new premises. “The way business is done has changed,” he adds. “‘Passing trade’ died a decade ago and now we work mainly privately or through fairs.” Mallett is one of the founders of (and has a 24 per cent stake in) the Masterpiece fair, which launches its second edition in London on June 30.

Georgina Adam is editor-at-large of The Art Newspaper