The Art Market: Gallery activism

Tomasso Brothers are displaying a Neapolitan cabinet, c 1660-80, in London

One of the most controversial and shocking Time magazine covers ever published featured a photograph of Bibi Aisha, an Afghan girl whose nose and ears had been cut off by her husband at the Taliban’s behest. The photograph was taken this year by the South African photographer Jodi Bieber, and copies will feature on the Goodman Gallery stand at the Art Basel Miami Beach fair which starts next week. In an edition of eight, the images are priced at $8,000, with all proceeds going to the Bibi Aisha Fund, which has helped cover the expenses of reconstructive surgery in the US. “Our gallery was born out of social activism; it was founded in 1966 during apartheid, but even in the commercial setting of Art Basel Miami Beach our focus is on the power of art to sensitise and confront the viewer,” says gallery owner Liza Essers, whose highly politicised stand also features other South African artists – among them Kentridge, Geers, David Goldblatt and Brett Murray taking a critical look at their own country.

While Art Basel Miami Beach is drawing the contemporary art crowd to Florida, considerable attention is focused on Christie’s Hong Kong sales, particularly in the light of the £53.1m recently paid for a Qianlong-dynasty vase in Britain.

The growth of the Chinese market is nothing short of staggering: according to a recent ArtTactic report, the global Chinese art market increased between 2008 and 2009 by 41 per cent. Fuelling this market are Chinese new rich; Forbes recorded 49 new billionaires in the mainland last year, and Sotheby’s says that the number of buyers from China who have purchased objects worth over $500,000 has increased by 400 per cent since 2004. Also firing prices is the Chinese state through its cultural agency Poly Culture & Arts, which has its own museum and mops up significant items of Chinese heritage, sometimes seemingly regardless of price.

This October, Sotheby’s Hong Kong sales were their best ever, raising almost $400m. Christie’s has just launched its sales season, with 14 auctions spaced over seven days, with the total series estimated at $220m. The auctions started on 26 Nov with wine – a huge market in Hong Kong – and continue until next Wednesday. As well as contemporary and classic art, porcelains and works of art, there are three prize lots from Fonthill House in Wiltshire. Expect fireworks on a pair of cloisonné cranes which may have been commissioned by the Prince Hongli (later Emperor Qianlong), and a yellow-ground famille-rose vase that could fetch over $3m.

London’s position as the hub of the European art market seems reaffirmed with a diverse group of galleries either expanding or opening in the capital. Among them are All Visual Arts (AVA), a hybrid gallery/investment scheme whereby art is commissioned, some sold and some retained. Until now it has shown its holdings in various locations, including a former church in Marylebone and the ex-Sierra Leone embassy in Portland Place. Now it has hired its own gallery – originally a double-decker bus-wash close to King’s Cross – an area that is attracting an increasing number of art galleries, triggered by Gagosian’s arrival there in 2004. On show will be existing AVA works plus new ones as they are completed.

A very different field is covered by the Tomasso Brothers, whose main gallery is their home in a 19th-century villa in Leeds. They are opening a London space next week in Pimlico Road, where they will show furniture, antiquities and Old Master paintings as well as the sculpture for which they are best known. Among the pieces on show in the new space is an over-the-top, three-metre-high pair of 17th-century Neapolitan cabinets, inlaid with tortoise shell, ebony and ivory (price about £750,000). Another out-of-towner who has set up in London is Trinity House Paintings, which specialises in Impressionist, Post-Impressionist and Modern British art. Founded in the Cotswolds four years ago, the firm has just opened a second gallery in Maddox Street. “London is a natural progression for us,” says director Steven Beale. And finally, the well-established dealer Robert Bowman has taken a second gallery, in Duke Street, where he is showing 19th- and early 20th-century pieces; he is sharing the space with Old Master paintings dealer Derek Johns.

Another week, another new fair: the latest initiative comes from France with PARIS-TABLEAV [sic]. Ranging across the period 1300-1850, the event is programmed for December 3-8 and will be held in the Bourse de Commerce, the former Paris stock exchange. The fair has been founded by 10 Parisian Old Master dealers – among them the gold-ground specialist Giovanni Sarti, Canesso, De Jonckheere, Bob Haboldt and Jean-François Heim, and each will invite one foreign dealer, bringing the number of exhibitors to 20. The Bourse de Commerce is already used for the spring drawings fair, Le Salon du Dessin, which works successfully along the same lines, by invitation only.

Is the world’s second most expensive painting (sold at auction) back on the market? A rumour that Picasso’s 1905 “Garçon à la Pipe”, which sold for $104.2m at Sotheby’s in 2004, is for sale is aired in the latest newsletter from the New York-based Artvest advisory service. One trade source, who is well placed to know, claims its buyer in 2004 was from Georgia; the best-known billionaire there is Boris Ivanishvili, who is also believed to have bought Picasso’s “Dora Maar” (1941) for $95.2m in 2006. So far, though, no one I have contacted in the art trade has been able to confirm the story that the painting is once again up for sale.

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