Thoughts On The 2017 Art Market

We all must agree that 2017 was one crazy year for the art market. Interest in high quality works from every area of the market remained strong … and that was seen at many levels of the art market (from the super expensive to the more affordable).

Of course, the market had its ups and downs. When they were up, the sky was the limit (or should I say the one with the deepest pocket was the limit). In January it was reported that Agnes Gund sold Lichtenstein’s Masterpiece to Steven Cohen (in a private transaction) for $165M … making it the 11th most expensive painting ever sold. Then in May, Basquiat’s Untitled, originally purchased in 1983 for $19,000, brought a record $110.4M (only number 28 on the most expensive list) to the Japanese collector Yusaku Maezawa – we were all shocked. On November 13th, van Gogh’s Laboureur dans un champ brought a cool $81M (number 52 on the list). But all those paled in comparison to what happened on November 15th, when da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi (which was bought for $129M a few years earlier) set the art world and most news agencies ablaze when it sold for over $450M (now the number 1 work). The question now on some people’s minds is: will we see a $1 billion painting in 2018?

And when they were down, they just failed: Francis Bacon’s Study of Red Pope 1962. 2nd Version 1971 was expected to bring between ￡60-80M, no takers; Egon Schiele’s Individual Houses carried a ￡20-30M estimate, and went unsold, while Basquiat’s Bronze (1982), which was expected to bring between ￡5 and ￡7 million just could not get out of the starting block.

I think we all now know that just because a work does not sell on a specific day, does not mean it isn’t a nice piece. All it means is that on that specific day nobody, at that specific sale, wanted it … put it back on the market another day and the story may be very different.

In our small area of the 19th century market we saw some nice action and many amazing works passed through our hands including an early Wiggins, two great Dupres, two classic Sanchez-Perriers, a major work by Wegmayr, a beautiful Boudin, a gem by Vibert, an Old Master by Delff (not our normal bread and butter), a few nice Berthelsens, five by Knight, fourteen Blanchards and I am sure some of you were trying to keep count of the Cortes … 51!

With the prices being paid for trophy works, it will be very interesting to see what works pop-up this year. Will we beat 2017's totals? Time will tell.