London sales show signs of buyer fatigue

Europe’s evening auctions of modern and contemporary art brought in a solid £311mn (£370mn with fees) at Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Phillips between June 28 and 30, yet showed signs of market fatigue. Speculation on younger artists continued but was cooler than in New York in May, while sellers who had arranged guarantees for blue-chip works looked like the winners this season.

Christie’s had the healthiest results, totalling a within-estimate £171mn (£204mn with fees) on June 28, including 20 Marc Chagall works sold by the artist’s estate and £11mn from works sold through its Paris saleroom. Highlights in London included two guaranteed trademark Monet paintings — “Waterloo Bridge, effet de brume” (1904) and “Nymphéas, temps gris” (1907) — which each sold within their estimates at £26mn (£30.1mn with fees). Sotheby’s two sales on June 29 came in below estimates, to make a combined £125mn (£150mn with fees), but they fielded the highest price of the season: Francis Bacon’s guaranteed “Study for Portrait of Lucian Freud” (1964) went under the hammer for £37.5mn (£43.3mn with fees, estimated at about £35mn).

Market observers note that the extended and intense spring season of biennales, auctions and art fairs has probably exhausted the limits of a relatively small pool of art buyers. Meanwhile, concerns about the rest of the year have begun to creep into the art market, which is not immune to the wider economic gloom.

London’s auctions, plus its seasonal events such as the Wimbledon tennis tournament, helped attract art enthusiasts to this year’s Masterpiece fair at the Royal Hospital Chelsea, its first in-person edition since 2019. Dealers who had also shown at the overlapping Tefaf fair in Maastricht noted more of an international set in London, though the works, including a strong showing of 20th-century British art, had a welcoming local feel.

At Richard Green gallery, sales included a view from Belle Vue House on the nearby Cheyne Walk, painted by the Scottish artist and Pre-Raphaelite muse Alice Boyd circa 1873-75 (priced at £550,000). From the booth of Philip Mould & Company, sales included a preparatory portrait of Diana, Princess of Wales, painted in a studio on Chelsea’s Tite Street by Nelson Shanks in 1994. The portrait, which shows Diana looking introspective two years after her official separation from Prince Charles, sold from Shanks’ collection earlier this year for $201,600, 10 times its auction estimate, and was quickly bought from Masterpiece for in excess of £300,000.

Christie’s has secured a collection of contemporary African art, with an estimated value of about £2mn, for its Frieze Week sales in London this October. The so-called Sina Jina collection is a part of the works owned by Robert Devereux, a longtime supporter in the field. Sina Jina is Swahili for “a place with no name” — as Devereux’s home on Kenya’s Lamu Island is also known.

About 70 works by artists including Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, William Kentridge and El Anatsui mark the first time in more than 20 years that a major collection of art from Africa and its diaspora has been offered at auction, Christie’s says. Yiadom-Boakye’s “Highpower” (2008) will be the highest estimated work in the October 13 sale, at £600,000-£800,000, while lesser-known artists — including Aïda Muluneh and Marcia Kure — will have estimates from £3,000. All proceeds will go to support Africa-focused arts and environmental charities.

Sotheby’s will offer about 1,300 pieces of decorative arts from the Hôtel Lambert, a Unesco-listed building on the Île Saint-Louis in Paris. Built in the early 1640s, the estate’s owners since the financier Jean-Baptiste Lambert have included the Marquise du Châtelet, whose lover was the writer Voltaire, the Polish prince Adam Jerzy Czartoryski and the Rothschild family. Bought from the Rothschilds in 2007 by Qatar’s Sheikh Hamad bin Abdullah al-Thani and family, they reportedly sold the house for €200mn earlier this year, having completed an ambitious — and sometimes contested — renovation.

Many of the contents Sheikh Hamad put in, which date from the 17th to the 20th century, now come to auction. Items include French furniture, Limoges enamels and antique jewels, with estimates that range from €1,000 to €1mn. Sotheby’s has not confirmed total expected proceeds from the Paris auction in October but it is likely to be more than $100mn. The sale will support the Al Thani Collection Foundation.

Art Basel has appointed Vincenzo de Bellis, curator and associate director of visual arts programmes at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis since 2016, as director of its art fairs in Basel, Miami, Hong Kong and Paris. Marc Spiegler, global director of Art Basel, will stay in his role and on the board of its owner, MCH Group. He confirms they continue to look for a replacement for Noah Horowitz to run Art Basel’s US business.

The appointment of de Bellis, director of the cutting-edge Miart fair in Milan between 2012 and 2016, heralds alternative activities for the brand. “The ambition is not to do more fairs per se, but there are other opportunities,” Spiegler says. He cites Art Basel’s advisory role with Art Week Tokyo and SEA Focus, a fair in Singapore, plus further digital and content initiatives. De Bellis joins in August.

The Texan artist Deborah Roberts, with her gallery Stephen Friedman, has donated the proceeds of a work priced at $75,000 to Chisenhale Gallery, a non-profit organisation in east London. Roberts, whose figurative collage works address the stereotypes faced by black children, gave the new work to benefit Chisenhale’s projects with young people, notably its youth mental health partnerships. “Untitled” (2022) has sold already from Roberts’s solo show at Stephen Friedman, I have something to tell you, which runs until July 23.

Zoe Whitley, director of Chisenhale, says Roberts, who came to visit the London space last year, recognised it as “a small place that punches above its weight” and admired its “respect for artists, irrespective of their racial and social-economic background”. Her donation means “we can continue relationships to help people who might not otherwise have access to art to see their creative potential”, Whitley says.

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