Contemporary art’s extraordinary success in London

Post-War and Contemporary art sold particularly well last week in London (28 and 29 June). In fact Sotheby’s result was its best-ever sales total for a Post-War & Contemporary sale in the UK capital and Christie’s managed to fetch £16m for a work by Francis Bacon!

Sotheby’s Contemporary sale generated £94.65m ($151.2m). The buyers who participated in the sale were clearly motivated by the exceptional quality of the 34 works from the Duerckheim collection, and the Sotheby’s total was £25.8m more than that of its rival Christie’s who nevertheless hammered 19 sales above £1m and, above all, the second best sales total of its history for a London sale in this segment.

Sotheby’s success was also that of the Duerckheim collection
The “private collection” stamp is particularly reassuring and motivating for buyers who are often also interested in buying a slice of History. The specificity of the Duerckheim collection sold by Sotheby’s was its particular focus on Contemporary German art. The 34 works presented allowed the auctioneer to generate £52.8m ($84.4m), substantially more than its estimated high total of £45.9m. Several paintings signed Sigmar POLKE, Gerhard RICHTER and Georg BASELITZ attracted strong biding. Polke’s Dschungel (Jungle) attained £5.1m, Gerhard Richter’s masterpiece Eisläuferin (Ice Skater) was hotly disputed for £2.1m and of the eleven works by Georg Baselitz, his Spekulatius reached £2.85m.

After 15 days of buoyant London sales, Sotheby’s share price gained 15% and closed the day after the Post-War & Contemporary art sale at $43.5 returning to its average price before its somewhat lacklustre New York results in May.

Francis Bacon
On 28 June, at Christie’s Post-War & Contemporary art sale, Francis Bacon’s Étude pour un portrait sold for no less than seven million more than its announced estimate. This very dark work, literally and figuratively speaking, was completed in 1953 and is today the 8th best result in the global ranking of Francis Bacon’s auction results in GBP (and 10th in USD).

During the prestige sales in February 2011, Francis BACON hit the headlines again with another triptych entitled Three studies for portrait of Lucian Freud which fetched £20.5m versus an attractive estimate of £7m to £9m (10 February 2011, Sotheby’s London). That was the artist’s fourth-best auction result, substantially behind his all-time record equivalent to £39.4m that was set in May 2008 at the peak of the market’s price bubble.

Since the beginning of 2011, Bacon’s works have already generated more than £68.4m for the two big auction majors Christie’s and Sotheby’s (in London, New York and Paris).
The previous year, over the same sales period, only one Bacon painting was sold (Study for Portrait, £740,000), and in February 2009 at Christie’s in London, a larger work, in the same vein as the Étude pour un portrait that fetched £16m on 28 June 2011, was bought in against an estimated range of £4m – £6m (Man in Blue VI, 152.7×116.8 cm). Admittedly, the canvas presented in 2009 does not have the subtlety of the study presented this year (despite being 40cm larger), but the 10 million pounds that separates the two canvases – in just two years – above all indicates that big-gun investment has returned to the market for the blue-chip artists of the Contemporary art segment, as economic visibility remains poor and uncertainty grips the property sectors. Art appears to be back on the map as an attractive investment alternative.