In the recent round of Contemporary and Impressionist art sales Sotheby’s trumped rivals Christie’s.
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Sotheby’s Paris leads in Contemporary Art Sales
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Over the last decade, collaborations between luxury brands and contemporary artists have gone beyond mere artistic partnerships towards a new kind of luxury branding.
PARIS – Art and fashion have always developed side by side, for fashion, like art, often gives visual expression to the cultural zeitgeist. During the 1920s, Salvador Dalí created dresses for Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiapparelli. In the 1930s, Ferragamo’s shoes commissioned designs for advertisements from Futurist painter Lucio Venna, while Gianni Versace commissioned works from artists such as Alighiero Boetti and Roy Lichtenstein for the launch of his collections. Yves Saint Laurent’s vast art collection, recently auctioned at Christie’s in Paris, testified to his great love of art and revealed the influence of a variety of artists on his own designs.
In the 1980s, relationships between luxury brands and artists were advanced when Alain Dominique Perrin created the Fondation Cartier. In the Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, a book marking the foundation’s 20th anniversary, Perrin says he makes “a connection between all the different sorts of arts, and luxury goods are a kind of art. Luxury goods are handicrafts of art, applied art.”
The Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemparain building in Paris
In the recent round of Contemporary and Impressionist art sales Sotheby’s trumped rivals Christie’s.
In the recent round of Contemporary and Impressionist art sales Sotheby’s trumped rivals Christie’s.
Iconic auction house Sotheby’s seems currently to be leading in the closely contested rivalry with Christie’s. The contemporary art sales on 2-3 June at Sotheby’s smashed expectations and made a total of €13.8m ($16.6m), with four of the top ten lots being snapped up by dealers. The impressionist and modern sale on 3 June was even more successful, fetching €17.5m ($21m). Meanwhile, Christie’s lagged behind making a more modest €7.58m ($9.1m) in its post-war contemporary sale on the 31 May.
So, which were the artworks and who were the artists that made the difference?
The Sotheby’s contemporary sales set records for Maria Helene Vieira da Selva and Jacques Villegle, whose colourful lacerated-posters-on-canvas Boulevard Saint Martin (1959) proved a hit in the sale room. Although the top lot was a painting by fashionable Jean Michel Basquiat, VP of Sotheby’s France Gregoire Billaut stressed that he wanted to maximize the potential of less fashionable work: “We are trying to develop and highlight French artists whose prices hadn’t reflected the quality of their work.”
An iconic, fashionable name also led in the impressionist and modern sale in which a Picasso ink-and-wash on paper work trumped pre-sale estimates. Samuel Valette, head of the impressionist and modern art department explained what made it so commercially successful: “It ticks all the boxes… because of its powerful, physical impact, its provenance and perfect condition.”
Christie’s was less triumphant with 60 of the 188 lots in its post-war and cotemporary sale going unsold. Here the top lot was Hommage à Matisse II (1993), by French-Chinese painter Zao-Wou-Ki which sold to a Chinese buyer for €972,000 ($1.17m), more than double its conservative estimate.
Sources
The Art Newspaper
