Welcome back to the Wall Power Inner Circle, where we’re still waiting for an art market
recovery. I’m Marion Maneker.
Greetings from the single-track, two-way roads of the Isle of Skye. Tonight, I’ve got my read on the data from the midseason Hong Kong and New York sales, and I’ll do a little compare and contrast. In short, it looks like the folks in Asia have gotten the memo: Estimates have come down, and bidding is getting a little above par. Meanwhile, back in New York, it’s a tale of two markets, with continuing strong demand for Roy
Lichtenstein material straight from the estate, alongside a tepid response for most of the rest of the offerings. Much more below the fold.
But first… |
- Christie’s to sell $40 million worth of work from Stefan Edlis and Gael Neeson’s art collection: A decade ago, Stefan Edlis and his wife, Gael Neeson, made a major donation of 44 artworks, with a value of $400 million, to the Art Institute of Chicago. But that was hardly all of the couple’s art. Edlis died in 2019 at the age of 94, and now Neeson is selling a number of works at Christie’s throughout the November sales cycle and
beyond. The announcement focuses on Andy Warhol’s vivid yellow double image of The Last Supper, from 1986, estimated at $6 million. Other works noted in the announcement, but yet to be estimated, are Ed Ruscha’s How Do You Do?, from 2004; George Condo’s Abstract Conversation, from 2010; Richard Prince’s untitled bronze sculpture of a cowboy, from 2011-13, along with his Double Nurse, from
2001; and John Currin’s Lake Place, from 2012.
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- Evelyn Lin appointed chairman at Sotheby’s Asia: The slowing of the Asian market has led some galleries to make strategic choices about their presence in Hong Kong. Pace recently announced that its exhibition space in the H Queen’s building will close at the end of the month, though the decision was obviously made some time ago. On Monday, Sotheby’s said that Evelyn Lin, formerly head of greater China for Pace, will join Sotheby’s Asia on November 3 as
chairman of modern and contemporary art.
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| Julie Brener Davich
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- Phillips London
highlights: Phillips has published the online catalogue for next week’s modern and contemporary sales in London. The top lot is a 1982 Basquiat work on paper, estimated at £2 million, that has changed hands a few times. (The consignor bought it at Phillips in 2020 for £2.2 million; 15 years before that, it went unsold at Sotheby’s at an estimate of
£150,000.) Other highlights include a 2017 Flora Yukhnovich painting for £900,000, a 2012 Noah Davis painting for £350,000, and a 2019 Sasha Gordon
painting for £80,000.
- Cadogan Tate on the move: Cadogan Tate, the logistics firm for art and interiors—in both homes and yachts—continues to grow. The firm just brought on Gemma Sudlow from Freeman’s Hindman, where she was a managing director, to serve as V.P. of sales and marketing. Before that, she led
collection sales at Christie’s for 17 years, where her team often partnered with Cadogan Tate to pack and ship the objects they were selling. “I sat in on my fair share of pickups for estate sales,” Sudlow told me. “For existing teams at Cadogan Tate, it’s refreshing because I know what they do, and for clients, I know what they need.”
Cadogan Tate, which sold a majority stake to private equity group TSG Consumer Partners in 2022, is catering to cross-category collectors who need services
for both their couches and the paintings that hang above them. By bringing on an auction specialist for the first time, the firm is signaling its intent to grow this differentiating part of its business, using Sudlow’s relationships with interior decorators, advisors, and collectors to help build the firm’s client base.
Cadogan Tate is bulking up its business operations, too. The firm just announced its seventh acquisition under TSG: Trefethen & Co Bader & Olson, a Seattle-based
furniture logistics and installation company. (Other acquisitions were in London, Dallas, and Aspen.) That makes them the first among their competitors to enter the Pacific Northwest. - Ng to Frick: Aimee Ng has been promoted to chief curator at the Frick Collection after a decade there as a curator. Her highly anticipated exhibition, Gainsborough: The Fashion of Portraiture, opens in February. She succeeds
British curator Xavier F. Salomon, who is leaving next month to take over from the retiring director of Lisbon’s Calouste Gulbenkian Museum. Similar to the Frick, that museum houses its namesake’s vast collection and is undergoing a renovation, scheduled to reopen next summer.
- Goldin nugget: The Vancouver Art Gallery and Walker Art Center have announced the joint acquisition of Nan Goldin’s 25-minute moving-image work,
Stendhal Syndrome, from 2024, which was shown at Gagosian’s Chelsea gallery last year and, most recently, at Les Rencontres d’Arles, an annual summer photography festival. The video, for which the institutions paid an undisclosed sum, cycles through two decades of Goldin’s photographs and art historical works, accompanied by a voice track by the artist. It takes its name from the body’s emotional and physical response to beauty.
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Simultaneous late September auctions in Hong Kong and New York told two
very different stories about the art market: Asia is showing signs of life, and rebalancing, while New York is still waiting for direction. |
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The first art market sales cycle of the fall semester happened to take place on the
same weekend on opposite ends of the world. In Hong Kong, all three of the major auction houses held sales on the same weekend for the first time—an inaugural modern and contemporary conjunction heralding a new era for Asia’s art capital. The Asian market, after all, has been somewhat muted since Covid. But the $188 million generated during the last weekend of September signaled real signs of life in the special administrative region of China, which has been losing its special status over the
last few years.
Meanwhile, the haul was less impressive in New York, where the three houses sold $88 million of art in total. A full 30 percent of that value came from Sotheby’s sale of works from Roy and Dorothy Lichtenstein’s estate. Here’s a breakdown of each sales cycle… |
Forward Movement in Hong Kong
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The Hong Kong sales offered up 492 works, of which 415 were sold, for a robust 84
percent sell-through rate and an average price of more than $380,000 per work. The hammer ratio—a measure of bidding against the estimate level that divides the aggregate low estimate by the aggregate hammer price—was a neutral 1.04, which suggests the market has reached a level of parity between estimates and bidders. Indeed, nearly half the works sold achieved prices within estimates, with 30 percent hitting above the estimate range and 21 percent falling below. This balance is also indicative
of a slightly advancing market, even if we can’t quite call this a return of animal spirits. |
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Among the top 10 lots, four were sold for compromise prices, one was bid above the
estimates, and five were sold within the estimate range. Pablo Picasso’s Buste de femme, from 1944, sold for nearly twice the $11 million estimate, or $25 million with fees. Zao Wou-Ki’s 1963 work, titled 17.3.63, made the estimate and sold for just under $11 million with fees. Yoshitomo Nara’s Can’t Wait ’til the Night Comes, from 2012, also made its estimate at just over $10 million with fees. But an earlier work by
Nara, Pinky, from 2001, got knocked down at a hammer price just three-quarters of the estimate, selling for about $7.3 million with fees.
Claude Monet’s Spring in Giverny, from 1885, didn’t quite get to the low estimate, but sold for close to $4.8 million with fees. A Yayoi Kusama painting of pumpkins saw bidding above the low estimate to sell for $4.45 million. Picasso’s late work from 1964, Nu assis appuyé sur des
coussins, also saw bidding that pushed the work above $4.1 million with fees. Even though Lichtenstein’s Vista with Bridge, from 1996, failed to reach the low estimate, it sold for a solid premium price a hair below $4 million. The same was true of Zao Wou-Ki’s 27.1.86, from 1986, which sold for 80 percent of the low estimate, or a little more than $3.8 million. The last lot in the top 10 prices in Hong Kong was a David Hockney painting, The
Twelfth V.N. Painting, from 1992, which was bid up to the top of the estimate range to make just a bit more than $3.5 million with fees.
Meanwhile, the top 10 works by hammer ratio included a variety of Asian artists, with seven of those works making six-figure prices but none climbing higher than $650,000. Those artists were Zao Wou-Ki, Eva Helene Pade, Pham Hau, Kasing Lung, Ju Ming,
Salvo, and Joseph Yaeger.
Picasso, Yoshitomo Nara, and Zao Wou-Ki captured 40 percent of the money spent in this sales cycle. Meanwhile, Kusama, Lichtenstein, Marc Chagall, Monet, and Hockney all posted market shares above 2 percent of the value of the sales. Takashi Murakami and George Condo rounded out the top 10 artists by market share. |
New York’s Middling Middle
Market
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In New York, a total of 692 lots were offered, of which 521 sold for $88.4 million—a
less impressive sell-through rate of 75 percent and an average price of just below $128,000. The hammer ratio for the sales was also a weak 0.96—it becomes an even weaker 0.86 when we remove the sale of the Lichtenstein estate material. As for what’s causing this softness in the middle market for contemporary art, it’s most likely that the best work isn’t coming up at auction.
Of the 521 works that did sell, 27 percent saw aggressive bidding, 49 percent sold within the estimates, and a
full 30 percent had to be sacrificed at prices below the low estimate. Consignors who had to sell had to compromise. |
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But the top 10 lots presented somewhat of a different story: Only two of them sold
for prices below the estimates, three were sold within the estimate range, and five works—most but not all of them by Roy Lichtenstein—were bid above the estimate range. Lichtenstein’s Reflections: Wimpy 1, from 1988, sold for more than twice the estimate to make almost $2.9 million. Joan Mitchell’s Peinture II sold below the estimates at just under $2.76 million. Lichtenstein’s Eclipse of the Sun II, from 1975, also failed to reach the low estimate,
selling for under $2.6 million. An untitled work by Keith Haring from 1985 made just under $2.5 million. Lichtenstein’s Galatea, from 1990, sold for twice the estimate at under $2.2 million. Wayne Thiebaud’s Three Cold Creams also doubled its estimate to make a little more than $2.1 million. Sam Gilliam’s Last September II was bid above the estimate range to make almost $1.8 million. An untitled work by Mitchell
saw solid bidding to a bit more than $1.6 million. Lichtenstein’s Entablature, from 1975, also made a solid $1.3 million. Finally, a tabletop Alexander Calder work was bid above the estimate range to make nearly $1.2 million.
You can see the effect of the Lichtenstein estate work in these results: Eight of the top 10 works by hammer ratio were also from the Lichtenstein trove. (The other two were works by Isamu Noguchi and David
Bates.) And all of those lots sold for prices below $355,000, which isn’t surprising in a midseason sale focused on cheaper works. But it still shows that buyers are splashing out mainly for works that are considered bargains.
Of course, market share was also skewed toward Lichtenstein, who accounted for almost a third of the dollars spent in the New York auctions. Mitchell, Haring, Alex Katz, Calder, Thiebaud, Gilliam, Fernando
Botero, Ernie Barnes, and Kenneth Noland rounded out the remainder of the market share table.
In short, it looks like New York, with the exception of Lichtenstein, is still waiting for market direction to emerge, though strong sales for artists like Olga de Amaral somewhat confirm the thesis that historical artists are attracting bidders. Meanwhile, things seem to have settled into a market equilibrium in Hong Kong, and
the relative lack of interest in contemporary art may be a bit of a hangover from the last few years, in which the market chased the newest talents. |
That’s all for today. Because I’m traveling, I didn’t make the usual charts that go
with this analysis. I assume you would prefer to see the data in chart form, as well as narrated. But if you like this format, do let me know. I’m always looking for your feedback. Just reply to this email or hit me up on 1.917.825.1391. That number works on WhatsApp, SMS, and Signal.
Tune in on Friday for more art market fun.
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