Following thin auctions during Frieze Week in London last month, the November sales in New York are under greater pressure to show signs of confidence. While uncertainty around the US presidential election hung over the consignment period, this week's announcement of Donald Trump's win, which saw US stocks soar to record highs, might encourage bidding.
Nonetheless, global headwinds of wars and other geopolitical issues endure. “If a collector needs to sell a work, the geopolitical situation will have nothing to do with it,” says the adviser Todd Levin. “But does the geopolitical situation take a bit of froth off the top of the market energy? Absolutely.” As Levin puts it: “Right now, everyone wants to buy stars, no one is remotely interested in buying comets. Classic Impressionist, Modern and post-war works being the stars, ‘wet paint’ contemporary names being the comets which burn out quickly.”
“It’s not been a good year,” says Christine Bourron, the chief executive of Pi-Ex analysts. “We’re in a period of contraction—it started in February 2023 and has been on a downward trend since. When the market first started to go down, we actually saw an increase in lots being traded—from spring 2023 until spring 2024. Volume went up and prices went down. But that seems to be over now. Perhaps we have reached the bottom of where sellers are willing to go. We’re seeing dramatically fewer auctions in this third quarter [at Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Phillips, live and online].”
Magritte’s La cour d’amour (1960) is part of the Mica Ertegun sale at Christie’s
Courtesy of Christie’s Images
Single-owner collections are crucial to these marquee auctions, so Christie’s and Sotheby’s will be relieved to have each secured a collector’s estate of classic Impressionist and Modern art as the lynchpin of their sales. Sotheby’s has that of the eyelash magnate Sydell Miller, the star of which is one of Monet’s desirable Nymphéas paintings, with an estimate in the region of $60m. At Christie’s is the collection of the interior designer Mica Ertegun, headed by Magritte’s L’empire des lumières (1954), estimated at more than $95m.
‘Big deals are happening privately’
“They’re good collections to be able to sell now because they’re very commercial—the Monet and the Magritte are exactly what the market wants,” says Nick Maclean, the co-founder of the advisory Eykyn Maclean. “There’s talk of gloom and doom, reports that the market is in freefall, but that’s not the case. Big deals are happening privately, particularly when the owners have no need to sell. It’s just a notch more cautious.”
Mica Ertegun, who died last year, was a renowned interior designer and her second husband, Ahmet Ertegun, co-founded Atlantic Records. The pick of Ertegun’s Surrealist, Purism, De Stijl and Colour Field works, alongside some Ukrainian and Russian Modernist pieces, will be sold in a dedicated evening sale. Her jewellery, design and decorative arts will be sold in New York, Paris and online in December. The whole collection is valued between $140m and $166m.
If it reaches the $95m estimate, Ertegun’s Magritte will set a new auction record for the Surrealist whose prices have risen sharply in the past few years. Magritte’s Empire of Light series—which span 17 works—depicts a nocturnal street scene with a daylight sky and includes some of his most sought-after works. Another from the series sold for £51.5m (£59.4m with fees) at Sotheby’s in London in 2022, nearly triple Magritte’s previous record. “His work had been undervalued but after this it won’t be,” Levin says. “He’s a great historical artist who deserves to be valued at these new levels.”
Last year, despite a jittery market and without a major collection to offer, Christie’s November evening sale still made $640.8m (with fees), its highest result for a non-single owner sale since the $785.9m auction in 2017 (more than half of which came from the $450m Salvator Mundi).
Miller magic
Julian Dawes, the head of Impressionist and Modern art for Sotheby’s in the Americas, describes the Sydell Miller collection as “the collection of the season, if not the year”.
Miller built her collection of art and design following the death of her husband and business partner, Arnold Miller, in 1992. Sotheby’s will disperse it across four dedicated sales with a combined value of around $200m, kicking off in New York with an evening sale of around 25 choice lots on 18 November, followed by a day sale on 19 November, then online sales of her fashion and design collections in December. Aside from the Monet, the evening sale will include a 1925 Picasso, La Statuaire (est around $30m), Wassily Kandinsky’s Weisses Oval (1921, est $15m-$20m) and several playful designs by Claude and François-Xavier Lalanne.
Dawes compares the Monet Nymphéas to the example that sold in the Rockefeller collection auction at Christie’s in 2018 for a then record $84.7m (with fees), a record outdone at Sotheby’s in 2019 when one of Monet’s Haystacks series sold for $110.7m (with fees). Miller’s Nymphéas is, in Dawes’s view, “on another level in terms of scale and the intense blue colour palette” and he is anticipating global bidding on the work.
A move to Modernism
“It is precisely because the ultra-contemporary market has softened that classic Impressionist and Modern works such as in the Miller collection have become more attractive,” Dawes says. “We have seen some of that money pivot into this consistent market over the last five years.” Contrary to what some say, Dawes maintains that the art market is still on its five-year bull run, despite “no shortage of geopolitical events”.
Still, Dawes acknowledges, filling these sales is tough, and “the biggest challenge is being able to put great collections such as this in front of clients…these collections are getting rarer and rarer”.
Although, at the time of writing, no third-party guarantees had been taken, attractive offers might be considered, Dawes says. The collection is “attractively priced, with a lot of potential for upside”.
That upside and resultant bidding energy has been lacking in evening sales in recent years as third-party guarantees, also known as irrevocable bids (IBs), become increasingly prevalent to prop up often bloated estimates. As the economist Clare McAndrew observes, “The market is ticking over, but there isn’t the urgency to buy.”
IBs and price bloating
In Bourron’s view, “IBs are driving an overpriced market. In the big sales, prices haven’t gone down at all, and the sellers aren’t willing to reduce their prices, so they want an IB to make sure their work sells.” Pi-Ex’s data shows that last November in New York, 68% of repeat sales (by value) were covered by IBs. But, Bourron says, “We can’t have 100% of sales covered by an IB, that defeats the purpose. So, what’s the next step?”
Bourron points to a recent lawsuit, filed by Sotheby’s in August, in which it is suing a New York dealer, Albert O’Hayon, the owner of Binoche Fine Art in Manhattan, for refusing to deliver on a $1.7m IB that he placed on a Camille Pissarro painting. O’Hayon says he was misled by the auction house, which allegedly told him another interested party was willing to pay more for the work. But they never materialised.
While it is unusual for an auction house to go after a guarantor for non-payment so publicly, perhaps it is the sign of things to come. The continued rise of third-party guarantees within a more temperamental market may well be accompanied by a litigious flip side.
Key New York auctions at a glance
18 November
- The Collection of Sydell Miller, Evening Auction, Sotheby’s 6pm
- Modern Evening Auction, Sotheby’s 7pm
19 November
- Modern & Contemporary, Art Evening Sale, Phillips 5pm
- Mica: The Collection Of Mica Ertegun Part I, Christie’s 7pm
- 20th Century Evening Sale, Christie’s 8pm
20 November
- 20th/21st Century Art Evening Sale, Bonhams 5pm
- Contemporary Evening Auction, Sotheby’s 7pm
21 November
- 21st Century Evening Sale, Christie’s 7pm
- Contemporary Art Day Auction, Sotheby’s 11am
22 November
- Post-War and Contemporary Art Day Sale, Christie’s 10am