‘MADNESS’ IS THE MOOD AT SOTHEBY’S

Normally somewhat subdued, the auction halls at Sotheby’s here this week have been marked instead by a distinct, if dignified, frenzy.

“Madness,” said a Sotheby’s spokesman, deftly dodging the rig of a Japanese television crew.

Just as succinctly, another company official contemplated the three-ring circus atmosphere that was accompanying a trio of major sales this week and offered up this decided understatement: “All hell is breaking loose.”

In one salon at that moment, the dazzling “Magnificent Jewelry” (to put it mildly) collection of the late Annie-Laurie Aitken was fetching somewhere in the neighborhood of $2 million. A short staircase away, well-to-do Shakespeare aficionados were observing the Bard’s 421st birthday April 23 by bidding on the celebrated First Folio--the first collected edition of William Shakespeare’s dramatic works--owned by the late Academy Award-winning songwriter Paul Francis Webster.

But among auction house officials and much of the art-buying public alike, it was the sale today and Thursday of the Florence J. Gould collection of Impressionist, post-Impressionist and Old Master paintings that was generating the kind of excitement physicians tend to diagnose as feverish.

In a spring auction season already distinguished by the dramatic $10.5-million sale last week (to the J. Paul Getty Museum) at Christie’s in London of Andrea Mantegna’s “The Adoration of the Magi,” the Gould collection was expected to set a total auction record for the year. One painting alone, Van Gogh’s glistening “Landscape With Rising Sun,” was inviting estimates of a record price for that artist, possibly as much as $8 million--or, some knowledgeable art authorities projected, more.

Like sports and high fashion, auctions come in spring and fall seasons. Spring, for whatever web of psycho-economic explanations, often seems crazier in the art auction world than its autumn counterpart. But seldom in recent memory could Sotheby’s executives recall an invasion of 16 television camera crews, at least 30 foreign press and the kind of magazine hyping that saw Vogue, for one, dubbing the Gould auction “the sale of the century.” Indeed, such interest did this collection incite that several days before the actual sale, 2,000 people jammed an ostensibly private viewing, and also, just days before, 270 guests paid $1,000 per person to benefit Gould’s favorite charity, the American Hospital of Paris.

“The Texas contingent alone took up three tables,” said Sotheby’s press liaison Carol Morgan, sounding mildly overwhelmed.

But to John Marion, chairman of Sotheby’s North America, that fact was itself reflective of a broader, burgeoning trend to an expanded, deregionalized purchasing constituency. In contrast to the auction arena of 15-20 years ago, Marion said, “I think the market itself is much deeper, much wider. Many, many more people are involved internationally.”

So confident of this expanded market is Sotheby’s that the auction house is deviating from its longstanding policy of requiring payment within three days of purchase: It now is offering yearlong credit, with an interest rate at or close to prime.

Just what accounts for this apparent broadening consumer network? Marion cited “the spread of wealth and the spread of information to the public around the world, and especially within the United States.”

Marion recalled Sotheby’s own now-legendary sale of Impressionist paintings last spring, where the $39.5 million total set an auction record. “In that sale,” Marion said, “there were 11 things that brought $1 million or more. Of those, 10 went to different buyers. So you had 30 people or so in one night--2 1/2 hours--who were prepared to spend a million dollars on a painting.

“Twenty-five years ago, in the beginning of my career, you used to have to scratch your head and wonder who there was who would buy a million-dollar painting.”

And as the spring spate of auctions kicks off, Marion predicted, “I think this week, the biggest, most telling development will be the number of buyers who are going to be private individuals, not museums.”

Christopher Burge, president of Christie’s New York, concurred. “A lot of people have made a lot of money in recent years,” Burge said. “Despite deficits, individuals are in a very strong economic position in this country.”

In terms of cycles in art sales, Burge said, “the big change took place in the mid- to late-’70s. I would say in 1975, still 70% of our buying public were dealers. By 1980, that figure would be reversed.” Now, Burge added, “I would say we are into a full, fat area of the cycle.”

At the same time, however, Marion conceded that the recent minor explosion of major collections did tend to generate a “momentum effect” in the auction world.

“I think there are all different reasons” for these collections suddenly becoming available to the public, Marion said. “There is no one underlying thing,” he added, “like the world was collapsing. If you look at the causes behind each of these sales, they are different.”

Obviously, as an executive of an auction house that adds a 10% fee to such major sales, “I wish it were a trend that would last forever,” Marion said.

Still, at Christie’s, Burge suggested that “a lot of the excitement” surrounding recent sales “has been generated by the promotional activities on the part of the auction houses” themselves. Sotheby’s sent the Gould works on a world tour, Burge noted, and his own house circulated a coming collection of Old Master paintings to Tokyo, London, Dallas and New York.

On the other hand, with or without promotion, Florence J. Gould and her collection were the kind of combination that turned museum directors and auction specialists alike into avid suitors prior to her death two years ago at 87.

“Can you imagine?” Carol Morgan said of Gould’s nearly 200 Impressionist, post-Impressionist and Old Master paintings. “All of this art was in one home.”

That home was El Patio, the villa near Cannes where Gould held forth as the force majeure of Riviera society, and where artists and literary figures converged for salons and dinner parties that featured 18th-Century Sevres china and English silverware from the same period.

Among Gould’s china was a service commissioned by Catherine the Great. So prone was Gould to draping herself in priceless jewelry that friends and associates sometimes worried for her personal safety. On ordinary days, wearing her trademark blue sunglasses and bright red lipstick, Gould also wrapped herself in a choker of 31 perfect pearls and often an emerald necklace with stones graduating from one to two centimeters in width. Gould’s favorite, however, was The Blue Princess, a 114-carat Indian sapphire.

It was a fantasy existence, one that might have stepped off the pen of F. Scott Fitzgerald, one of so many Lost (and future) Generation writers who frequented the Thursday-afternoon salons Gould and her husband held in Paris. Born to French immigrants living in San Francisco, the young Florence Lacaze was whisked to France after the great quake of 1906. Following a brief, youthful marriage, she was pursuing a career in light opera when Frank Jay Gould, youngest son of American multimillionaire railroad baron Jay Gould spotted her at a recital and fell hopelessly in love.

After Gould’s death in 1956, his widow moved to the Riviera and began amassing a spectacular collection that spanned the 14th through 20th centuries and included works by Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, Goya, Manet, Monet, Corot, Cezanne, Bonnard, Seurat, Renoir, Pissarro, Courbet, Sisley, Boucher, Boudin, Delacroix and Daumier. She acquired the famous Van Gogh, painted while the artist was in a sanitarium in 1889, from J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist.

Sotheby’s auction in Monte Carlo last June of the contents and furnishings of El Patio brought $6.6 million. Florence Gould’s jewelry was sold by Sotheby’s for $8.1 million. Museums that might have coveted her art collection were outwitted when, in her will, she stipulated that along with the furnishings and jewelry, her art be auctioned to benefit the Florence J. Gould Foundation, established to promote “Franco-American amity.”

“It was a total commitment to art and beauty,” Sotheby’s Morgan said of Gould’s lavish life style. “And in the end she will get what she probably wanted. Undoubtedly, certain pieces will wind up in museums around the world, and others will go to individuals who will appreciate them as she did.”