Major auction houses are hedging their bets in the fall season of sales that begins Monday, offering fat guarantees to sellers to secure their works — and pricing some of their top items more conservatively after the spring season demonstrated weakness in the blazing-hot $60 billion art market.
And now, sellers are trying to anticipate how the uncertainty of a new war in the Middle East will affect them.
Auctioneers at the three rival companies, Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Phillips, have been digging deeper into private collections for one-off paintings that might spice up their modern and contemporary art sales, given the thinning availability of estates to draw from (typically driven by deaths and divorces).
“We have built the sale in a very old-school way,” said Alex Rotter, chairman of Christie’s departments overseeing 20th- and 21st-century art, who said that his team shopped around individual collectors to acquire works by Joan Mitchell ($25 million to 35 million), Claude Monet ($65 million) and Francis Bacon ($50 million).
“We went for paintings that would create the most buzz.”
Persons:
Auctioneers, Phillips, ”, Alex Rotter, Joan Mitchell, Claude Monet, Francis Bacon, “
Organizations:
Sotheby’s