After almost 15 minutes of painfully slow bidding, on 15 October a snow scene by Peter Doig sold for £14.2m including fees (it sold for £12m hammer) at Christie’s 20th/21st century London evening sale. The painting, Ski Jacket (1994), provided the highest price of London’s Frieze Week sales, the warm-up act to next month’s enormous New York auctions.
Given a global art market in the doldrums and continual unflattering comparisons to Paris, London had something to prove with these mid-season sales. The results showed a more stable, if still choosy, market.
Painted in the same year that Doig was nominated for the Turner Prize, Ski Jacket was fresh to the market after 30 years in the hands of the late Danish collector Ole Faarup and had the added advantage of being sold days after Doig’s new exhibition, ‘House of Music’, opened at the Serpentine Gallery. Its sister painting of the same name is in the Tate’s collection. At Christie’s last week, five bidders competed for it and it sold for double the £6m–£8m estimate to Francis Outred, formerly Christie’s chairman and head of post-war and contemporary art in Europe, for a client (estimates do not include fees).
‘In today’s market, to have a depth of bidding like that is rare, and to get that atmosphere requires just the right work,’ says Katharine Arnold, vice-chairman of 20th/21st Century Art, Christie’s Europe. Arnold attributes the thinning since the immediate post-Covid bump to rising interest rates and geopolitical uncertainty, which have deterred speculators.
Another work by Doig from Faarup’s collection, Country Rock (1998-99), was expected to sell for more than Ski Jacket, at £7m–£10m, but went for £9.2m (£7.6m hammer), while Chris Ofili’s Blossom (1997), also bought by Faarup in the 1990s, sold for £2.1m (£1.7m hammer), above a £1m to £1.5m estimate.
There was a lacklustre reception for three paintings by Lucian Freud fresh from another private collection: Woman with a Tulip (1944), Self-portrait Fragment (c. 1956) and Sleeping Head (1961–71). The self-portrait, the sale’s cover lot, sold to its third-party guarantor for £7.6m (£6.2m hammer), below pre-sale expectations of £8m–£12m. Arnold is baffled: ‘Honestly, I don’t know why [there was a lack of interest]. I thought they would outperform their estimates, but in the end they all sold to their third-party guarantors and will go into their private collections.’
Yoshitomo Nara’s Haze Days (1998), estimated at £6.5m–£8.5m, was one of five works that went unsold in the sale. Unusually, it came to auction naked, with no guarantee. ‘My biggest takeaway from the market over the past couple of years is that the role of the third-party guarantor has changed: it is no longer about speculating, it is how we ensure a confident first bid in the room,’ Arnold says. ‘With the Nara, there were a couple of collectors on the phone who ultimately sat on their hands […] in a world that feels less certain, a guarantee is very important. I don’t think it’s indicative of any lack of demand for Nara.’
So far, so male. But in contrast to some price corrections for male artists, there were a few record prices for women, notably Paula Rego. The enormous Dancing Ostriches from Walt Disney’s ‘Fantasia’ (1995) sold for £3.5m (£2.8m hammer) at Christie’s, a price that Arnold says ‘feels like a triumph, because I feel she is one of the most brilliant female artists we can lay claim to in this country, and yet she’s so undervalued.’ A record was set for another British artist, Annie Morris, at Christie’s, when Bronze Stack 9, Copper Blue (2015) sold for £482,600 (£380,000 hammer) – four times the estimate. That record was broken two days later at Sotheby’s, when Morris’s Stack 9, Ultramarine Blue (2018) sold for £635,000 as part of their ‘Contemporary Day’ sale.
In all, Christie’s evening sale made £164.8m (£86.5m hammer) from 60 lots, just below the £87m–£129m pre-sale estimate but 30 per cent higher than the equivalent sale last year. ArtTactic reports that, overall, London’s evening sales at Christie’s, Phillips and Sotheby’s were up just over 20 per cent from last Frieze week. At £133.9m hammer, this was the highest total for October sales since the last market peak in 2022, albeit propped up by the highest level of auction guarantees seen in the past decade. This, ArtTactic posits, ‘could be a signal that the worst may indeed be over for London’s high-end auction scene’.
Sotheby’s evening sale on 16 October was led by Francis Bacon’s Portrait of a Dwarf (1975), which had been in a private collection for 40 years, along with a late self-portrait by the artist and two monumental sculptures by Rodin from his Burghers of Calais series.
Portrait of a Dwarf was initially one half of a larger canvas divided by Bacon; the other half, Two Figures, depicting the artist and his lover George Dyer, was given by Bacon to the art historian Michael Peppiatt. It was then sold at Christie’s in 2016 for £5.5m including fees. Last week, Portrait of a Dwarf sold for £13.1m (£11m hammer) – well above the £6m–£9m estimate. ‘It was a great auction moment and exactly what people want to see, a great bidding battle,’ says Tom Eddison, head of contemporary art at Sotheby’s. The painting was underbid by Emma Ward of Ward Moretti, who observed that the week’s sales had been positive: ‘The market seems to be moving with lots of solid auction results.’
The London-based sculpture dealer and collector Robert Bowman bought both the Rodin works — Jean de Fiennes, vêtu, Grand Modèle for£762,000 (£600,000 hammer) and Pierre de Wiessant, vêtu, Grand Modèle, vêtu for £889,000 (£700,000 hammer). The Sotheby’s auction – at 27 lots, half the size of Christie’s – totalled £47.6m (£39.2m hammer), though it should be noted that Sotheby’s has to fill three such evening sales a year in London, while Christie’s only has two, having dropped its June auction in 2017. Reflecting on the two evening sales last week, Stephanie Armstrong, managing partner at art advisory firm Beaumont Nathan, observes: ‘Christie’s had the stronger sale this time around, anchored by a well-curated core of fresh-to-market, commercial paintings that fed the market exactly what it had been craving.’
