Christie’s Renewal of Sales Departments starting with May ropes

Am Monet, Bridge Waterloo, effet de brouillard, (misty effect) painted from 1899-1903 as an example of Christie’s decision to favor a broader term for referring to art passing over the 20th century as the pictorial depiction of the person- art of the bridge – shrouded in mist and mist and crossing the moving River Thames – evokes attraction, influencing artists for years to come.

“For me, the Waterloo bridges are the paintings that reflect the reality of non-objective landscape painting,” said Jussi Pylkkänen, Christie’s global president. Monet’s “harmonies and symphonies”, Pylkkänen says, are replicated in contemporary works by Scottish artist Peter Doig, for example, and in contemporary artist’s landscapes German Gerhard Richter.

“When you consider that Monet painted 120 years ago, it is almost impossible to believe that at the end of the 19th century an artist could effectively paint these types of abstract symphonic paintings. create it, ”Pylkkänen says.

Christie’s decision to scour the former name reflects trends in the way art is sold – and bought – accelerated by the pandemic. Last year, Christie’s and its competitors offered a number of large cross-department sales, mixing jobs from a number of occasions. The sales reflected the material available in the market, but also the desire of collectors, who often do not adhere to one category when shopping for art.

“Something we’ve known for a while, but what came to mind [in 2020] how collectors gathered in the 20th century, ”says Johanna Flaum, head of post-war art and contemporary art at Christie’s in New York. It seemed irrational to use World War II as a cut between pictorial and modern art and then post-war and contemporary art.

“Painting continued in its 20th century before, during, and after the war,” says Flaum. “Gathering during that time and focusing on the 20th century and the accommodations and possible pairs in a spanning collection [the century] makes and makes a lot of sense. ”

The new categories will not keep up with the calendar dates of the century. 20th century sales include works painted in the 1880s, such as Ideas, and stop at 1980, a decade that includes the art of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. 21st century sales take off from there, largely covering an additional forty years of art.

“The 1980s looked like a natural place to start,” says Flaum. Many artists of the time dealt with issues that arise today, such as the pandemic of AID, and issues of race, sexuality and identity.

This new division in the key sales segments – which will lead to the day-to-day sales – also allows Christie to focus on emerging, high-profile and high-profile artists. work attracts ever-increasing prices.

In a report giving a 2021 market perspective, London-based research firm ArtTactic noted that sales of artists aged 40 and under rose by almost 54% last year at the top three auction houses – Christie’s, Sotheby’s, and Phillips.

These younger artists are of interest to younger collectors, too – buyers who play a positive role in the market. Art Basel and UBS World Art Market Report released earlier this week found that 30% of millennial collectors spent more than US $ 1 million on art in 2020, more than any age category other.

And, the report noted that more than half of the sales value of public auction was for post-war art and contemporary art, and nearly half of these sales were for living artists – up 5 % from a year earlier, the report said. Contemporary art ranks second with 26% of sales, but only 10% of sales were for visual and post-visual art – a 5% decrease on a share from a year earlier sin.

Procurement in the fine arts sector can be a problem for auction sales, as much of it is in museums or kept away in large private collections – not many of which came to market last year. With ebb and flow marking this region over the last few years, a lack of sustainable supply was not the force behind Christie ‘s decision to scrap the region, Flaum says.

Monet’s Waterloo Bridge, in the middle of the 20th century festival, was among 18 paintings of the bridge at an exhibition in 1904 featuring large pieces of the Monet series in London, which the artist painted at the height of his career – returning to London several times over four years to stay at the Savoy Hotel.

“The view of the river, he knew, would provide countless changes of light, changes of atmosphere,” Pylkkänen says. The result, he said, “takes you to a hard-hitting London that only a few can explain. ”

Other topics in the series included Charing Cross Bridge and the Houses of Parliament. Many paintings from this series found their way to major American museums, including the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the Chicago Institute of Art. The sister is painting with the one Christie has offered, also with the subtitle effet de brouillard, formerly owned by Russian avant-garde collector Ivan Morozov, and is now in the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Pylkkänen says.

Christie’s work, which is sold by an anonymous private collector, was never in a museum, but was purchased a year after the 1904 exhibition by Amy Lowell, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet who was one of the American collectors who were drawn to avant-garde works from the time from Europe, and who understood what working as Monet “means to paint in the future,” he says .

“She understood through her own emotions the nuances, the elegance, the ballet quality of this painting – that’s why she got it,” says Pylkkänen.

The upcoming sale marks the first time one of the artist’s paintings of the bridge has hit the market since 2007, when it was bought by the late collector and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen Waterverto Bridge Couvert Temps, for about US $ 35 million at an auction in London, Pylkkänen says.

Prices for Monet’s work have been much higher in the years since, with Sotheby’s selling the artist’s work Meules, 1890, or haystacks, for US $ 110 million, taxed, in May 2019. Pylkkänen says Christie’s price Waterloo Bridge at what he considers to be an “accessible, accurate level. But he expects “big competition.”

The 20th Century Festival will also feature the sale of Andy Warhol
Nine Multilolored Marilyns (Reversal Series), 1979-1986, and 21st century sales will include Jordan Casteel
Jiréh, estimated at between US $ 350,000 and US $ 550,000.