Market Review
Art Basel showed some signs of market fatigue – unlike the sales figures for Impressionist and Modern art at auction in London.
Susan Moore, Monday, 25th August 2008
Back in London, however, the salerooms showed little evidence of this, as more auction records tumbled and prices continued to spiral. Christie’s saw Monet’s Le Bassin aux Nymphéas (Fig. 1) double its expectations to sell for £40.9m on 24 June, and Gino Severini’s Danseuse (Fig. 3) made £15m the following evening, a record for any futurist work of art at auction. Strikingly, modern British seemed to be
the flavour of the day at both the Grosvenor House fair and in the saleroom. At the sale of the Simon Sainsbury collection at Christie’s on 18 June, the top lot was not a piece of handsome English furniture – although there were plenty of records for those too – but for Paul Nash’s Encounter in the Afternoon of 1936. It had come with expectations of £120,000-£180,000 but fetched a phenomenal £937,250.
Figures
1 Le bassin aux nymphéas by Claude Monet (1840-1926), 1919. Oil on canvas, 100.4 x 201 cm. Christie’s, London, Impressionist and Modern Art (24 June), £40.9m
2 Memory for Forgetting by Qiu Anxiong (b. 1972) 2007. Train, projectors, dvd players, steel supports and projector screens, 2.45m x 300cm x 420 cm. Boers-Li Gallery at Art Basel
3 Danseuse by Gino Severini (1883-1966), 1915. Oil on canvas, 100 x 81 cm. Sotheby’s, London, Property from a Private Collection (25 June). £937,250
LATEST NEWS & COMMMENT
Manhattan transfer
The Lower East Side, once home to immigrants and aspiring artists, is no receiving the uptown treatment.
Shakespeare in stone
The National Trust's plans to acquire Seaton Delaval Hall are a tribute to a genius who has inspired writers and artists for centuries.
In pursuit of collectors
The Fitzwilliam Museum is celebrating the centenary of the directorship of Sydney Carlyle Cockerell with an exhibition that makes clear that he was in many ways the first modern museum director.
Comments
Post a comment