Market Review
There is no sign of any loss of confidence in the contemporary art market, but away from the headline-grabbing sales, classic Chinese art performed strongly.
Susan Moore, Sunday, 22nd June 2008
Giacometti was one of the star turns of the May Impressionist & Modern sales, with his enormously tall 1960 bronze Grand femme debout II (Fig. 7) fetching a new auction record of $27.5m at Christie’s on 6 May and his Portrait de Caroline at Sotheby’s fetching a record $14.6m for one of his paintings. There were records, too, for Léger, Munch, Miró and Monet, the last’s $41.5m a bit of a surprise for the pleasant but otherwise unexciting Le Pont de chemin de fer a Argenteuil, consigned to Christie’s by the Nahmad family of dealers. One wonders if Sotheby’s calculation that 67% of its Impressionist evening sale went to American collectors – a bit of an anomaly these days when Europe (which includes Russia) seems to take the lion’s share – was based on classifying the international Nahmad clan, who bought heavily here, as US buyers.
An illustration that it is not only contemporary art that sells in multiples of auction-house estimates came during the Chinese works of art sales in London. On 13 May, Christie’s offered a small but exceptional group of imperial jade, enamels and porcelains from the collection of Général Olmar Blot, who acquired these pieces while in service in Beijing in 1860. The international market leapt to snap them up – paying 10, 15, 20 and even over 30 times the estimate. The two top lots both fetched £1.36m. One was a pair of Qianlong fine white jade circular boxes and covers carved with elephants that went to an Asian private collector; the other – also Qianlong but this time imperial – a white jade vessel and cover in the form of an archaic bronze guang, carved in shallow and high relief (Fig. 4). It sold to London dealers Eskenazi against an estimate of £60,000-£80,000. Eskenazi also paid the top price of £1.59m at Sotheby’s on 14 May in the highly successful sale of the Chinese silver collected by the Swedish industrialist Dr Johan Carl Kempe. The prize here was a very rare parcel-gilt bowl and cover from the 8th-9th century Tang Dynasty, superbly engraved and gilt with luscious blooms. Dr Kempe’s gold vessels had made record-breaking prices at Sotheby’s Hong Kong in April.
It was Christie’s spring Hong Kong season in May, and this time (no pun intended) the runaway success was the remarkable collection of clocks-cum-automata made for the imperial Chinese court and consigned by the Nezu Museum in Tokyo. Every lot sold to bidders who came from most corners of the globe – and the record total made horological history. World records were set at HK$39.5m for a Chinese clock, and at HK$36.1m (£2.3m) for an English clock, a garishly bejwelled and enamelled late-18th-century number by Henry Borrell which opens to reveal realistically rocking sailing ships. Christie’s also saw a new world record set for Chinese contemporary art when an anonymous buyer paid HK$75.4m (£4.9m) for Zeng Fanzhi’s Mask Series 1996 No. 6 (Fig. 6).
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