Record auction sales at astonishing prices reinforce the growing strength of the contemporary and modern art market, but buyers will not compromise on quality and condition

Apollo, June, 2004 by Susan Moore

In just under e week in New York in May, not one but two $100m thresholds were finally, inevitably breached. On 5 May, speculation as to whether Picasso's Garcon a la pipe (le jeune apprenti) would top the $82.5 million realised in 1990 for Van Gogh's Portrait of Dr Cachet and become the most expensive work of art ever sold at auction ended when the Rose Period painting changed hands for a phenomenal--some said obscene--$104m (58m[pounds sterling]). The following week, Christie's notched up the highest ever total anywhere--$102m--for a Post War and Contemporary art sale. It is hard to say what the market found more heartening

Was it the fact that there were at least four bidders out there who are able and willing to spend serious money on a twentieth-century icon? (To spend $100m on a Picasso, I'm told, you need to be worth at least $3bn--and want the painting badly.) Or is it the gathering heat of the post war and contemporary art market, a field with wide horizons offering a far more plentiful supply of major works of art? At Christie's intensely competitive sale, twenty-five works sold for over $1m, there were new auction records set for nine artists, and record percentages were achieved (ninety-seven per cent was sold by value, ninety per cent by lot). As it did last year, the sale outstripped the auction-house's Impressionist and Modern art totals, A day later, Sotheby's Contemporary sale notched up another thirteen records--and was 100 per cent sold by value and lot.

From Christie's Impressionist and Modern art sale on 4 May onwards, records began to fall like ninepins. What the season affirmed is the market's unquenchable desire for high-performing blue-chip art, be it Picasso or the likes of a metaphysical De Chirico ($7.2m, 4m[pounds sterling]) or a classic Jackson Pollock drip painting ($11.6m, 6.5m[pounds sterling]). Those were both outstanding works being de accessioned by New York's Museum of Modern Art (see pp. 107 on the controversy this has aroused). But what the mixed fortunes of the Whitney Greentree Foundation sale reminded us, despite it making a colossal $190m (106m[pounds sterling]), is that these days, unlike the late Eighties, no one is buying regardless of quality and condition.

The prospect of a $100m Picasso inevitably had everyone in its thrall; owners and estate lawyers were only too keen to consign works on the back of it (Sotheby's have scooped the pool this season, not only winning the Whitney business but the Brunet pictures to sell in London this month--an announcement with more details about the latter will follow). In New York it also seemed to deflect attention away from the annual International Fine Art Fair at the Seventh Regiment Armory (7-12 May). This year's event looked a little uneven, but nonetheless paraded marry of the world's leading dealers, mostly from Europe, and some outstanding works of art. Inevitably, as at every international fair, there were familiar faces among the exhibits as well as the exhibitors, but also glorious revelations, such as the enchanting M and Mme Olivier, a wonderfully grand and yet intimate pair of portraits in tibet most delectable of media, pastel, signed and dated 'Jean-Baptiste Perronneau 1748'. Perronneau's technical mastery of his medium is impressive; the condition outstanding. On the stand of Katrin Bellinger at Colnaghi--their debut on the open market (the distinguished collector Camille Groult acquired them from the Olivier family and they passed by descent in his)--they bear a seven-figure price tag.

Works on paper were a particular strength of this fair, drawing collectors and curators from across the us and beyond. As soon as the doom opened, for instance, New York's Morgan Library snapped up a project for a mural by the sixteenth-century Florentine, Pier Francesco di Jacopo Foschi, shown by Crispian Riley-Smith. The plethora of red dots extended to modern works on paper and paintings too. Agnew's sold two important Picasso drawings in the region of $300,000 each; Galerie Tamenaga, one of the artist's portraits of Dora Maar for over $1m. Sales of paintings over $1m were reported for anything from a substantial Alfred Stevens (John Mitchell) to Ribera's powerful Penitent St Jerome (Jean-Luc Baroni), and Cazeau-Beraudiere sold pieces by Dubuffet, Calder and Tanguy. Stoppenbach & Delestre had a dealers' dream Ticket--selling three works to three new clients.

Dealers' shows also dotted the galleries of Manhattan. Ambitious in scope and ravishing to the eye and imagination is Salander-O'Reilly's inspired gathering of Constable's skies, the first show in the us devoted to the British master's enduring passion for the dramas played out in the heavens. Focusing on the 'scientific' investigations that the artist made in the environs of Hampstead Heath in the 1820s, these predominantly small studies in oil on paper or pastel have been drawn from leading museum collections in Britain, the us and Australia, peppered with private holdings (until 25 June).