Art Transfer Market – update

New figures from Christie’s reveal that the auction house is coping with the recession, thanks to a record-breaking sale of the collection of Yves Saint Laurent in Paris.

Last week, Christie’s produced some figures for the first six months of this year, providing an opportunity to analyse how the art market has been coping with the recession. The figures show how overall sales have fallen, and, more specifically, how particular regions and categories of sale, from Old Masters to contemporary art, have fared.

Owners have been holding on to their art, either because they could no longer secure lucrative guarantees from the salerooms or were waiting for prices to stabilise, and worldwide sales have dropped by 35 per cent, from £1.8 billion to £1.2 billion. But the fall was by no means uniform. Dubai (down 70 per cent) and the UK (down 62 per cent), were the worst hit regions. British and Irish art sales (including Victorian, Scottish and 20th-century art) shrank more than any other category, by a steep 80 per cent.

The US, which had already begun to recede this time last year, suffered a 51 per cent drop in sales volume. Reflecting the nervousness of the local market, sales of American paintings, in spite of the numerous works on sale from American museum collections, fell by 67 per cent. Close behind was Asia and the Middle East, the fastest growth area last year. Affected by a dramatic decline in the amount of contemporary Chinese art offered, sales there fell by 49 per cent. Contemporary art sales in the West fell by 69 per cent.

The outstanding region was continental Europe. It rose by nearly 400 per cent due to the phenomenal success of the £305 million Yves Saint Laurent sale in Paris in February. Most of this was generated by record-breaking prices for modern classics by Matisse, Brancusi, Mondrian and de Chirico. As a result, Paris emerged as the top-selling venue for Christie’s with more sales (£339 million) than even London or New York, for the first time in 50 years.

A knock-on effect was felt at Christie’s Impressionist and modern art department which, although seeing 70 per cent falls in turnover at its regular London and New York auctions, suffered only a 17 per cent fall worldwide. Another major impact of the sale was on 20th-century decorative arts. This was the second most lucrative element of the St Laurent sale, raising nearly £52 million. Sales of 20th-century decorative arts rose by 233 per cent as a result.

Other sectors to perform better than average were Old Masters, which benefited from a merger with 19th-century European art sales and increased by 13 per cent; European furniture, which held steady after a boom last year and registered a mere 8 per cent decline; and books and manuscripts sales, which fell by just 13 per cent.

A further compensation to the general downturn was that 5 per cent more of the offered works sold than last year. So while Christie’s has been struggling to persuade people to sell high-value art at auction, it has found enough buyers at the right price to achieve a better success rate than it did last year. High-value works may, however, be finding their way through Christie’s private sales division, which took £200 million, and is thought now to be on the rise. Private sales are a discreet way of offering art with high price tags without risking the ignominy of failure at auction.

Sotheby’s is not due to announce its results until next Tuesday. Comparisons will be complicated by the fact that while Christie’s has made its calculations in sterling, which minimises the downturn because of changes in the exchange rate, Sotheby’s will do so in dollars. A preliminary inspection of Sotheby’s website indicates that, with the exception of Paris, similar falls have taken place globally and that there has been an average downturn of 67 per cent in sales from $3 billion (£1.5 billion) last year, to just under $1 billion this year. The percentage drop will be trimmed, possibly to 60 per cent, by the addition of sales made after auctions, and by private sales which are not detailed on its website.

When calculated in dollars, Christie’s sales downturn increases from 35 per cent to 49 per cent. That will bring the difference between the two big auction houses down to just one man and his art collection: Yves Saint Laurent.

Introduction to Marion Wallace-Dunlop

Painter, suffragette and the first modern woman to starve herself for politics

One hundred years ago this month, Marion Wallace-Dunlop (1864–1942) became the first modern hunger striker. She came to her prison cell as a militant suffragette, but also as a talented artist intent on challenging contemporary images of women. After she had fasted for ninety-one hours in London’s Holloway Prison, the Home Office ordered her unconditional release on July 8, 1909, as her health, already weak, began to fail. Her strike influenced those of Mohandas Gandhi, James Connolly and others who followed her example. Thousands of other strikes have moved the practice in new directions, but we should acknowledge its originator. Students and scholars of the women’s suffrage movement know Wallace-Dunlop’s name, some of her protests, and the main events of her life, but her art and writings are almost entirely unknown. Recently discovered works of hers reveal a mind that knew how images are read, how stories are made and publicity generated.

Along with the materials released in 2005 through the British Freedom of Information Act (2000), Wallace-Dunlop’s art and writings, along with her prints, sketches, letters and photos, provide a more complete genealogy of the hunger strike, and show a woman challenging the aesthetic and gender boundaries of her day. Her oil portrait of her sister Constance (“Miss C. W. D.”, 1892) portrays a woman with a shawl wrapped around her shoulders, who sits erect, alarmed, with a tinge of fear, and stares disturbingly out at the viewer. Meeting and challenging our own gaze, her haunted stare makes us feel we have stumbled into a private space, the subject’s own. Wallace-Dunlop had a talent for creating such unsettling images, and the modern hunger strike, with its accompanying narrative of a prisoner starving him- or herself to death out of loyalty to a political principle, has something in common with this painting.

Picasso’ Paintings Battle

Sotheby’s is selling Homme à l’épée, painted on 25 July 1969, with a suggested price tag of between £6m and £8m at its annual summer sale of Impressionist and modern art.

Christie’s will sell a work of the same title, painted the following day, for between £5m and £7m at its summer sale.

Two vivid depictions of a musketeer, painted by Pablo Picasso on successive days 40 years ago, will be sold by rival auction houses.

The battle of the Picasso works – described by experts as “a remarkable coincidence” – illustrates the continued demand for collectable paintings despite the impact of the credit crunch on the value of some modern art. The average auction price of contemporary art has fallen 76.2 per cent since May 2008, according to analysts ArtTactic.

The paintings, part a series depicting a musketeer, were created by the artist four years before his death and reflect his Old Master influences, Rembrandt and Velázquez.

The Sotheby’s painting was chosen by Picasso to be on the poster for an exhibition of his later works in Avignon in 1970 and has never before been sold at auction.

The Christie’s painting, which is six inches bigger at 63in by 51in, was bought by a London art collector in 2005 for £2.7 million, and is expected to have doubled in value over the four years.

“Picasso was the greatest artist of the 20th century and the musketeer paintings illustrate his confidence,” said Melanie Clore, co-chairman and head of Impressionist and Modern Art at Sotheby’s. “It is a monumental and powerful work and anticipated so much of the contemporary art that followed it.”

She added that the parallel sale of the two paintings was “a remarkable coincidence” but that interest in Picasso’s musketeer paintings had been heightened by a recent exhibition of other artist’s other work at the National Gallery in London.

The Spanish artist, who died in April 1973 aged 91, was not alone in producing a series of very similar paintings. Monet’s Water Lillies series contains about 250 paintings featuring the surface of a pond.

Christie’s sale also includes work by Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Henri Matisse and René Magritte as well as Au Parc Monceau, a Monet expected to make up to £4.5 million.

Sotheby’s sale also includes a Monet, Giacometti, Renoir and Toulouse-Lautrec.

Picasso’s late series is thought to have been inspired by his reading of Alexander Dumas’s classic historical romance, The Three Musketeers, during a hospital stay in 1965 during which he underwent surgery on an ulcer.

His vigorous, intense late works did not receive immediate critical acclaim but have since become more popular. The painter defended his later style saying: “When I was a child, I could draw like Raphael, but it took me a lifetime to draw like a child.”

” a true Realist exhibition “

Cézanne and Beyond at the Philadelphia Museum of Art shows a collection of works of art of staggering quality.

www.philamuseum.org

Not many exhibitions can be said to change the way you think about art, but Cézanne and Beyond at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in the US is one of them. As powerful a show as you are ever likely to see, it brings together 50 paintings, watercolours and drawings by the painter from Aix-en-Provence to hang alongside the work of 18 20th-century artists who fell under his spell.

The roll-call is highly selective but fully international – from Picasso, Braque, Léger and Matisse to Giacometti, Mondrian, Morandi, Gorky, Kelly, Johns, and Marden. Curators Joseph Rishel and Katherine Sachs bring the story up to the present day with photographs by Jeff Wall and a touching conceptual piece by Francis Alÿs. The quality and importance of the works of art they have gathered together in these galleries is so staggering that no private collector or public institution would have loaned their treasures to more than one venue, which means the show won’t travel.

Thematically, the exhibition begins with Cézanne’s memorial exhibition at the Salon d’Automne of 1907 when Braque and Picasso turned away from Fauvism and Primitivism to embark on the exploration of pictorial space that resulted in the first Cubist pictures one year later. In a series of comparisons so convincing that no explanatory labels are necessary, we see Picasso and Braque learning from Cézanne’s landscapes and still lifes to approach a flat canvas as if it had three dimensions. From him, they learn to treat pictorial space as though it were as solid as the stone surface the sculptor carves in high relief. Following Cézanne’s lead, they use parallel brush strokes to build up the innumerable faceted planes out of which volumes and forms mysteriously emerge in early Cubist paintings.

Both artists adopted Cézanne’s slightly elevated viewpoint and his tendency to draw the eye into a picture, then abruptly to flatten the middle distance in order to block spatial recession and so bring the viewer back to the reality of the flat canvas. But the most profound lesson was internalised: the artist’s obligation is to represent as fully as possible the appearance of things not by slavishly copying nature but by capturing the physical sensation of seeing a world that is at once static and eternally changing. For Cézanne knew that the eye registers not only colour, volume and shape but also less tangible realities such as weight, texture and movement.

Another visitor who absorbed the lessons of the landscapes and still lifes he saw in the 1907 exhibition was Matisse. He was also the first major artist to react instantly and passionately to Cézanne’s late images of bathers, especially the giant nudes who fill the large canvases now in the National Gallery in London and in Philadelphia. In the two years 1908 to 1909, he returned to these strange, lumbering creatures with bodies as massive as tree trunks in his Bathers with Turtle and again in the monumental bronze reliefs showing a nude woman from the back. That the work of the Fauvist who painted Luxe, calme, et volupté in 1904-05 did not decline into the decorative inconsequence of his contemporaries Derain or Dufy comes down to his head-on encounter with Cézanne’s monumentality, and in this exhibition we see this happening before our very eyes.

You could easily argue that modernism (or one strand of it, anyway) begins with Cézanne’s struggle to balance pictorial illusion with the need constantly to re-assert the integrity of the picture plane – and so to remind the viewer that the physical surface of the canvas is flat. In his Madame Cézanne in a Red Armchair of 1877, the figure sits so close to the picture plane that her hair and feet are cut off by the top and bottom edges of the canvas. She is at once fully three dimensional and curiously flattened, because although we know that her legs are closer to us than her lap and torso, the vertical stripes of her gown don’t give us any indication of where recession into pictorial depth starts.

Picasso was so fascinated by this picture that in his sublime canvas of 1932, The Dream, he flattens the sleeping figure of Marie-Thérèse Walter radically, then goes further than Cézanne by refusing to provide the shadows, receding diagonals or modelling which would indicate that the red armchair and patterned wallpaper (both remembered and quoted from the Cézanne) are further away from us than the figure. Even so, we viewers put space and depth into the picture because, as Cézanne also demonstrated time and again, we see with our minds as well as with our eyes, and we know they must be there.

Cézanne always thought like a sculptor, in three dimensions, which may be why so many painters who also sculpt, such as Matisse, Picasso, Giacometti, and Johns, are fascinated by him. Take, for example, the motif of the slightly open drawer seen from straight on, which in several of Cézanne’s still lifes and in the Card Players from the Metropolitan Museum of Art forms our point of entry into the picture’s fictive space. Both Picasso and Giacometti realise that Cézanne uses the drawer as a formal device through which he can suggest a precise degree of depth that the mind knows is there but the eye cannot see. Jasper Johns finally took the motif to its logical conclusion by inserting a “real” three-dimensional drawer into a canvas of 1957, but because it can’t open – and even if it could it would only be as deep as the canvas – it is only slightly less imaginary than the drawers of Cézanne.

More than any other artist in the show, Johns is fascinated by the pictorial sleights of hand that are so much a part of the infinite mystery of Cézanne’s art. But, along with the American Marsden Hartley, he is also the one who has seen and explored the sensuality of the later nudes. To take one example, in a remarkably explicit series of tracings in ink after a version of Cézanne’s Bathers in his own collection, he transforms one of the figures into a male, whom he shows lost in sexual reverie as he imagines the nudes in the clearing behind him.

You’d think, wouldn’t you, that abstract artists would not have been as fascinated by Cézanne as representational ones. But as Brice Marden said, Cézanne is “the greatest realist and the greatest abstract artist at the same time”. Marden’s three horizontal bands of grey-green and grey-blue were inspired by the almost palpable weight Cézanne gave to the body of water sandwiched between the earth and sky in his view of the Bay of Marseille, Seen from L’Estaque. Ellsworth Kelly lifts a single passage from a Cézanne landscape showing an irregularly shaped patch of blue water, and then enlarges it to create a minimalist canvas in an achingly pure shade of blue, that is at once wholly abstract and not abstract at all.

As you walk through the show, the original insights of Rishel and Sachs keep stopping you in your tracks. They observe, for example, that in painting Mont Sainte-Victoire so frequently, Cézanne created a motif that became so familiar that it functioned like an armature over which he could explore effects of light, texture and colour. In one late view in this show, the whole foreground is a medley of dark green blue and ochre brush strokes that would be incoherent had we not known that he is painting the landscape beneath the mountain we’ve seen so often in other pictures. And here’s the corker: next to it hangs one of Jasper Johns’s maps of the United States, where, just as with Cézanne’s mountains, the image is so well known we don’t have to think about what we are looking at but can concentrate on the wonderful colours and the sensuous brush work.

It is particularly painful to have to leave out Léger and Mondrian in this all-too-superficial overview, but I have to stop writing. Let me just say that this is one of the most important shows I’ve seen in two decades of reviewing for this paper.