Impressionist and Modern Art

OF the three new world auction records taken at Christie’s Rockefeller Center saleroom on the evening of November 6, two of them were for pieces of sculpture. This follows on from Christie’s success in the May Impressionist and Modern sales, their best – as Sotheby’s were for them – for some time, when Constantin Brancusi’s 1913 bronze Danaïde took $16.5m (£11.6m), the highest price for any piece of sculpture sold at auction.

GIVEN the fiscal disadvantages involved, Christie’s and Sotheby’s won’t usually be looking to Paris as a venue for sales of Modern art, but Christie’s (buyer’s premium 20.93%) had a modest French Collection of Post-Impressionist & Modern Paintings and Drawings on offer on September 28 that fared well enough, with 40 lots from 43 sold for a hammer total of €1.04m (£650,000) with seven per cent bought in by lot and just two per cent by value.

Sotheby’s break mould in bid to lure Germans: A little piece of history was made on October 8 and 9 when Sotheby’s four-part dispersal of the Beck Collection of 20th Century German and Austrian art became the first major sale ever to be conducted in euros in a London auction room.

Interpreting Matisse/Picasso by Elizabeth Cowling, published by Tate Publishing. ISBN 1854373935 £9.99 pbk

Matisse Portraits by John Klein, published by Yale University Press. ISBN 0300081006 £35hb

Matisse Picasso published by Tate Publishing with essays by six international curators including the two British curators John Golding and Elizabeth Cowling. ISBN 1854373927 £40 hb, ISBN 1854373765 £29.99 sb

USA: The works of two American impressionists, Fern Isabel Coppedge (1888-1951) and Edward Henry Potthast (1857-1927), both of whom were plein air painters whose works were admired for their fresh and colourful imagery, are featured here, together with a sample of the folksier treatment of rural America by Paul Seifert, a German fruit and vegetable farmer who took to painting as a lucrative sideline.

Stockmarket jitters may not have had any noticeable impact on the upper ranges of the Impressionist and Modern market but further down the scale things were looking less rosy. At Bonhams (19.5/10% buyer’s premium) on June 24 the 95-lot sale took £446,020 with a 52 per cent take-up by lot.

Concerns that turmoil in the world’s stock markets would spill over into London’s June round of Impressionist, Modern and Contemporary sales proved to be largely unfounded.

The German painter Hans Purrmann (1880-1966) is described by Bénézit as an artist who was heavily influenced by Matisse (with whom he had contact in Paris from 1906-1914), but who lacked the greater artist’s “sense de lumière et de la couleur”.

La Guérison de l’Epiléptique, 3ft x 2ft 4in (91 x 70cm), pictured right, by André Bauchand (c.1927), based on Raphael’s Transfiguration, sold on low-estimate for €3800 (£2450) at Blanchet (17.94% buyer’s premium) on May 15, partly reflecting the indifferent condition of its paintwork.

Sotheby’s quadruple recent results and Christie’s celebrate boost too: Barely a month after its former chairman and chief executive were sentenced in a New York court, Sotheby’s bounced back in their Manhattan saleroom on May 8 with a $126m (£88.7m) Part I auction of Impressionist and Modern Art.

Dr Anton C.R. Dreesmann spent several million dollars of his fortune on Impressionist and Modern art, but, for all this expenditure, few specialists in this most expensive of all sectors of the art market seemed to have regarded Dr Dreesmann as a major collector.

Phillips have released details of a bumper sale of Contemporary art to be held in New York on May 13. The announcement came as art trade rumours persist about the reasons for the auction house postponing their May 6 sale of Impressionist and Modern art until June at the earliest.

We reported in last week’s Antiques Trade Gazette's Art Market pages on the Ellekilde, Copenhagen sale and reflected on the popularity of Scandinavian interiors. An altogether different Danish artist to enjoy success at that sale was Gerda Wegener (1885-1940), a magazine illustrator, whose work proves especially popular with an American audience.

Is there a future for Phillips de Pury & Luxembourg (15/10% buyer’s premium) now that Bernard Arnault and the financial might of the LVMH group have distanced themselves from the company and the enormous guarantees it was paying to secure high-value consignments?

With less than a month until the crunch series of Impressionist and Modern Art sales in New York, it is still not clear whether Phillips will be joining Sotheby’s and Christie’s at sales which netted the company $124m last year.

A large desert Caravane by Victor Huguet (c.1895), 4ft 4in x 6ft 8in (1.31 x 2.02m) and inspired by Fromentin, led the Delorme-Fraysse picture sale on February 12 with €82,000 (£51,200).

Against the background of the London Impressionist, Modern and Contemporary sales both the major auction players held specialist Surrealist evening sales – Christie’s (17.5/10% buyer’s premium) on February 4 and Sotheby’s (20/15/10% buyer’s premium) on the following evening of February 5.

The London art market received a major lift in the salerooms last week when Sotheby’s and Christie’s attracted remarkably strong levels of international demand for their February round of Impressionist, Modern and Contemporary auctions.