The Sotheby’s auction house kicked off its annual art sale in New York this week against the backdrop of a gloomy economy that had some observers wondering whether there were any deep-pocketed buyers left to snap up paintings for tens of millions of US dollars.
Well, there are. And they’re breaking records.
Some of the most famous artworks of the past century were up for sale, including Edgar Degas’ Dancer in Repose and Kazimir Malevich’s Suprematist Composition (from 1916).
The Degas sold on Monday night for just over US$37 million, an all-time high for the artist, whose previous best was US$28 million for the same piece in 1999, a Sotheby’s spokeswoman said. The work’s presale estimate was US$40 million.
The Malevich work sold on Monday for just over US$60 million, in line with its presale estimate. The sale price set a record for the artist and for any Russian artwork sold at auction, Sotheby’s said.
The previous record for Malevich was US$17 million for another Suprematist Composition (from 1919 to 1920) in 2000; the previous Russian record was US$20.9 million for Wassily Kandinsky’s Fugue in 1990.
And Edvard Munch’s Vampire, a brooding painting of a woman with cascading auburn hair, set a new record for the Norwegian artist, US$38.2 million, Sotheby’s said. The previous record was US$30.8 million for Girls on a Bridge, set last year.
The buyers’ identities weren’t immediately disclosed.
Among those who reportedly are selling pieces from their art collections are Kathy Fuld, the wife of Richard Fuld Jr, the former chief executive officer of Lehman Brothers who has been vilified for his company’s role in the global financial meltdown.
The high-end art market had stumbled in recent months as the hedge fund traders, financiers and Russian, European and Middle Eastern buyers who helped prop up the art market in recent years fell victims to the financial crisis.
Sagging prices at last month’s London auctions suggested that the financial meltdown had finally ended the art market boom, which has seen a series of price records shattered over the last few years.
Christie’s and Sotheby’s contemporary art sales generated at least a third less money than predicted, and many items were unsold.
The auction houses’ New York sales are considered an important test of how price levels have changed since the summer and of how buyers will respond to the top-selling works, said Ian Peck, CEO of the art finance firm Art Capital Group.
The last such sales, in May, generated more than US$500 million between the two houses.
Last week, Sotheby’s withdrew Pablo Picasso’s Arlequin, one of the star lots at its Monday sale, for private reasons.
The move was “a sign that auction houses and buyers fear the risk of a downturn in prices is too great to ignore,’’ Peck said.
That fear also was evident in an online auction last week when a 1717 Stradivari cello reached a record bid of US$1.35 million but failed to reach its estimated value of US$1.48 million to US$1.97 million or its reserve, according to Tarisio, an auctioneer of fine stringed instruments and bows. The reserve is the lowest undisclosed price the consignor agrees to sell a work.
Sotheby’s and Christie’s said on Monday they were cautiously optimistic about the outcome of the Impressionist and modern art sales this week and postwar and contemporary art sales next week.
“The result will speak to market expectations,’’ said Guy Bennett, international co-head of Impressionist and modern art at Christie’s. “It won’t just be about one sale. The market is far deeper and broader than that. I think we found the right balance in terms of price points and also the quality of the things we’re offering.’’
The Fulds reportedly are selling a group of abstract and minimalist drawings at Christie’s on Wednesday of next week. The highlight of the 16 Master Drawings of American Post War Art from a Private Collection is a 1951 Willem de Kooning drawing of a nude called Woman, estimated at US$4 million.
Another important indicator in the art auction market is the number of guarantees by the auction houses. A guarantee is the undisclosed sum sellers are promised regardless of whether the work sells or not.
To offset risk that some works would not sell in the current financial climate, Sotheby’s has cut guarantees from $458.5 million last year to US$306.1 million this year.
Christie’s has guaranteed six out of 85 works in its Impressionist and modern art sale today, compared to the spring, when it guaranteed 16 out of 58 works from the same period.
“The things that we have chosen to guarantee this season we feel very comfortable with, we feel we made the right decision and we’ll see how the market reacts,’’ said Bennett.
To hedge against risk, Sotheby’s had lined up a buyer for Malevich’s Suprematist Composition who had placed an irrevocable bid on the abstract painting. If the painting went higher than the agreed-on price, which wasn’t disclosed, then the bidder with the irrevocable bid would be compensated according to prior arrangements.
The painting was recently returned to the artist’s descendants following a court battle and after residing for many years in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.
Despite the troubles in the market, as recently as last month the glimmer of the art market’s strength was evident when works by Damien Hirst sold for US$200 million at Sotheby’s in London.
Sotheby’s CEO William Ruprecht, in an interview last month, said “there’s no question’’ that some buyers are not willing to pay as much as before. “But there’s also no question that there’s an awful lot of interest in important works of art,’’ he said.
Peck said the “worst situation in the upcoming auctions would be for people to lose confidence in art as an asset or its perceived liquidity.’’
Among the other works coming up this week and next are Untitled (Boxer), a 1982 Jean-Michel Basquiat painting owned by Lars Ulrich of heavy-metal band Metallica. Christie’s expects it to fetch more than US$12 million at next Wednesday’s sale but feels it could surpass the current Basquiat record, US$14.6 million.
Taiwanese chip-making giant Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) plans to invest a whopping US$100 billion in the US, after US President Donald Trump threatened to slap tariffs on overseas-made chips. TSMC is the world’s biggest maker of the critical technology that has become the lifeblood of the global economy. This week’s announcement takes the total amount TSMC has pledged to invest in the US to US$165 billion, which the company says is the “largest single foreign direct investment in US history.” It follows Trump’s accusations that Taiwan stole the US chip industry and his threats to impose tariffs of up to 100 percent
From censoring “poisonous books” to banning “poisonous languages,” the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) tried hard to stamp out anything that might conflict with its agenda during its almost 40 years of martial law. To mark 228 Peace Memorial Day, which commemorates the anti-government uprising in 1947, which was violently suppressed, I visited two exhibitions detailing censorship in Taiwan: “Silenced Pages” (禁書時代) at the National 228 Memorial Museum and “Mandarin Monopoly?!” (請說國語) at the National Human Rights Museum. In both cases, the authorities framed their targets as “evils that would threaten social mores, national stability and their anti-communist cause, justifying their actions
In the run-up to World War II, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of Abwehr, Nazi Germany’s military intelligence service, began to fear that Hitler would launch a war Germany could not win. Deeply disappointed by the sell-out of the Munich Agreement in 1938, Canaris conducted several clandestine operations that were aimed at getting the UK to wake up, invest in defense and actively support the nations Hitler planned to invade. For example, the “Dutch war scare” of January 1939 saw fake intelligence leaked to the British that suggested that Germany was planning to invade the Netherlands in February and acquire airfields
The launch of DeepSeek-R1 AI by Hangzhou-based High-Flyer and subsequent impact reveals a lot about the state of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) today, both good and bad. It touches on the state of Chinese technology, innovation, intellectual property theft, sanctions busting smuggling, propaganda, geopolitics and as with everything in China, the power politics of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). PLEASING XI JINPING DeepSeek’s creation is almost certainly no accident. In 2015 CCP Secretary General Xi Jinping (習近平) launched his Made in China 2025 program intended to move China away from low-end manufacturing into an innovative technological powerhouse, with Artificial Intelligence
RSS