In the face of a bearish market, Sotheby’s has soldiered on with its June Modern and contemporary art evening sale in London, even though its rival Christie’s shows no intention of resuming its own.
Yet Sotheby’s commitment to this struggling auction season might be shaken following the results of last night’s (24 June) sale, which saw a spate of passes on classic works and mostly muted bidding.
Overall the evening netted £50.8m (£62.5m with fees) from 48 lots, and managed an 87% sell-through rate. This total falls just below the £55.2m to £81.1m pre-sale estimate (all estimates calculated without fees) and marks a 25% decrease from last year’s equivalent sale, which made £71.8m (£83.6m with fees).
Among the eight works passed was the evening’s third lot, Egon Schiele’s Portrait Study (Head of a Girl, Hilde Ziegler). Created in 1918, a few weeks before the artist’s death, the black crayon sketch lacks the psychological intensity and graphic rawness of his most popular works and it failed to clear its £300,000 low estimate. “This was a little disappointing, especially as we’d had pre-sale interest in the work,” says André Zlattinger, Sotheby’s head of Modern art, Europe. The work came to Sotheby’s following a settlement between the owner and the heirs of Heinrich Rieger, Schiele’s dentist and one of his most ardent collectors, who was murdered by the Nazis because he was Jewish. Zlattinger says he is “confident” that Sotheby’s will secure a buyer privately.
Straight after the Schiele, Barbara Hepworth’s pair of alabaster stone sculptures, Vertical Forms (1965, est £2m-£3m), also failed to find a buyer. Further Impressionist and Modern works that were passed later in the evening included paintings by Alfred Sisley (est £700,000-£1m) and Renoir (est £800,000 to £1.2m).
Tamara de Lempicka’s La Belle Rafaëla
Courtesy of Sotheby’s
The evening’s top lot was a sumptuous, modestly sized painting by Tamara de Lempicka, depicting her muse and lover Rafaëla in the nude. La Belle Rafaëla (1927) has reached a wide audience, serving as the cover for a recent Broadway play about the Art Deco painter. Despite this, bidding interest dissipated swiftly after auctioneer Helena Newman steered the work up to its £6m low estimate; it hammered just north of that, at £6.1m (£7.4m with fees), going to a buyer in the room.
Another voluptuous female nude, this time by Jenny Saville, also failed to draw much fervour. While many of the artist’s top collectors are in town for her major solo exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London, Juncture (1994) hammered just below its £5m low estimate, making £5.4m with fees.
However Saville’s monumental drawing Mirror (2011-12) proved far more popular and elicited one of the few bidding battles of the evening. The eight-foot charcoal work, of a reclining woman, redolent of Manet’s Olympia among a host of other canonical references, was chased by six bidders. Eclipsing its £1.2m high estimate, it eventually went to a phone bidder via the Modern British art specialist Tamsin Golding Yee for £1.7m (£2.1m with fees), making the auction record for a Saville drawing.
Marlow Moss’s White, Black, Blue and Red
Courtesy of Sotheby’s
Undoubtedly the strongest performance last night was for a canvas and wood relief by Marlow Moss, a rather obscure female British painter associated with the Dutch De Stijl movement. White, Black, Blue and Red was painted in 1944, the same year a studio fire destroyed much of her output, meaning she has had few major posthumous surveys, although a small 2014 Tate show brought her to the attention of contemporary audiences. That fire also means Moss’s paintings do not often come to auction. Such scarcity seemed to spur seven bidders into competing for the work last night, doubling its £300,000 high estimate to make £609,000 (with fees), and setting a new auction record for the artist.
Despite wider trends pointing to a enduring dip in the market for ultra-contemporary art, a handful of works made in the past decade performed well against their estimates yesterday, including the sale’s first two lots. Yu Nishimura’s through the snow (2023) sold to a collector in the Middle East for £292,100 (with fees) against a £70,000 high estimate, while Joseph Yaeger’s Loyalty to the nightmare chosen (2022) fetched £101,600 (with fees) against a £60,000 high estimate.
So, might Sotheby’s consider rebalancing this sale to include fewer Impressionist and early Modern works? A longstanding bugbear of the June sales are their proximity to the much bigger Modern evening sales in New York in May. This diminishes the ability of the auction houses to consign top quality works within a category where supply is scarce and overall demand is dwindling. Sotheby’s head of contemporary art Ottilie Windsor counters that each passed work failed to sell “for individual reasons”, while Zlattinger points out that three of the five highest prices this sale were for pre-1970 works. This includes Monet’s Aux Petites-Dalles (1889), which hammered at its £5m low estimate (£5.6m with fees).
As to the wider fate of the London June sales, Windsor remains determined to continue. “Tonight we did £62m of business that we would have missed out on had we not done this sale. This is the moment London shines, post-Art Basel, and during the museum gala season. It’s an essential moment that the market needs to be involved in, and I feel extremely proud of our commitment.”