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Analysts try to make sense of up-and-down sales at Christie’s and Sotheby’s
On Monday, when the fall auctions kicked off in New York, the art world seemed as placid as a seascape by Canaletto. But now that same outlook has grown stormy. The sales have also raised fresh concerns about the fate of next week’s postwar and contemporary art auctions, which begin Tuesday.
Analysts, art dealers and readers of our On the Block blog (blogs.wsj.com/ontheblock) spent Friday grappling with how to interpret the week’s up-and-down sales of Impressionist and modern art at Christie’s and Sotheby’s. Christie’s had a steady start by selling $395 million worth of Impressionist art at its evening sale Tuesday. The highlight of its week was Henri Matisse’s “L’Odalisque, harmonie bleue,” a portrait of a reclining blonde that sold for $33.6 million above its $20 million high estimate. But Sotheby’s sent the art world reeling Wednesday night when a quarter of its offerings went unsold and its stock shares subsequently fell by nearly a third.
Steven Pincus, the managing director of the DeWitt Stern Group, a fine art practice specializing in risk assessment and insurance for art, isn’t predicting a total crash. “The market went from the speed of light to the speed of sound,” he says. A plateau in prices for Warhol, Basquiat, and Rothko might even be healthy over the long run, he added, since it may compel auction houses to stop giving risk-free guarantees to sellers. Such a move could “level the playing field” for private dealers, he said.
By KELLY CROW and LAUREN A.E. SCHUKER
November 10, 2007; Page W2 Wall Street Journal
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