Animation Art Popular Despite Downturn

For 18 years, through half a dozen recessions, Howard Lowery has run something of a Mickey Mouse business in Burbank.

“My experience of late, even with the bad news, is that people are continuing to buy animation art,” said Lowery. “I think the greatest impact in the field of art collection is in Old Masters and Impressionists. You have to realize that that was a field that went up far too fast.”

Auctioneers at Sotheby’s in New York would be the first to testify that Lowery has been on to something for a long time. Two weeks ago, an auction of animation cels and backgrounds from the 1989 Disney hit “The Little Mermaid” grossed $1.2 million. An earlier Disney auction of “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” animation art brought in a record $1.6 million.

Though not on the scale of Sotheby’s, Lowery has been staging his own auctions quarterly for the last year at his Burbank gallery and, like the mermaid and the rabbit, the Disney items have proven to be the big moneymakers. At the most recent auction three weeks ago, a cel and background from “Peter Pan” pulled in a bid of $22,000. The previous high bid at a Lowery auction was a cel and background set from “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”--also a $22,000 item, he said.

His next auction will be in April, right before income tax returns are due and right after the nation may be officially in a recession, should the government’s present predictions of economic doom prove true. Lowery expects prices to rise, not drop.

“What I’ve found in animation collecting is that people are becoming more discriminating. We had a very dramatic rise from about 1984 through 1988, but then it leveled off. We’re still in that plateau period, but not much longer I don’t think.”

For one thing, an original Roger Rabbit or an unretouched Goofy is more comforting to the modern collector than, say, a dusty old Renoir or a gloomy Rembrandt. For another, Disney is growing more popular all the time in Japan, Saudi Arabia and Germany.

Sotheby’s Art Index Since its inception in 1975, the Sotheby’s Art Index has charted the highs and lows of auctioned art-from Oriental ceramics to Old Masters. The firm’s Aggregate index is compiled from among 13 art categories. Source: Sotheby’s International