Newer art shows it has legs

New York

Business was even less predictable than usual in this spring’s two-week marathon of Impressionist, Modern and Contemporary art auctions. The sales were organized in a climate of war and economic gloom, and the roller-coaster results reflected a bad case of art market jitters. As collectors moved from Sotheby’s tony establishment on the Upper East Side to Christie’s luxurious quarters at Rockefeller Center to Phillips, de Pury & Luxembourg’s austere, industrial plant in Chelsea, some sales sizzled; others sputtered. A few artworks brought enormous prices; others went begging.

But when the last auctioneer cracked the last gavel Friday afternoon at Phillips, it was clear that the sales were more successful than might have been expected. It was also evident that the market for Contemporary art -- made from about 1945 to the present -- continues to rise. It seems to be only a matter of time until Contemporary art auctions routinely outshine those of the longtime market leader, Impressionist and Modern art.

That didn’t appear to be the case at the first big Contemporary art auction, Tuesday night and the following day at Sotheby’s. The auction house sold $42.5 million worth of Contemporary art, roughly half the $81.1 million grossed for Impressionist and Modern art the previous week.

But the picture changed dramatically Wednesday night and Thursday at Christie’s, which had its biggest sale ever of Contemporary art, bringing in a total of $88.9 million. Auctioneer Christopher Burge was in his element as he wheedled and charmed another $100,000 -- or even $1 million -- out of bidders, besting the Impressionist and Modern total of $72.5 million for the first time in the auction house’s history.

Phillips, which pulled out of the Impressionist and Modern art market altogether last year as part of a drastic cost-cutting operation, organized a relatively modest sale of Contemporary art this season. The firm sold $14.1 million worth Thursday night and Friday.

The three companies’ Contemporary sales added up to $145.5 million, less than the $153.6 million worth of Impressionist and Modern art sold at Sotheby’s and Christie’s. And star artworks in Impressionist and Modern sales still commanded bigger sums than their Contemporary counterparts. Las Vegas casino mogul Stephen A. Wynn captured the limelight during the Impressionist and Modern art sales with his purchase of a $23.5-million Renoir and a $17.3-million Cezanne.

But such highly publicized sales tend to obscure the continuing shift in the balance of power. Contemporary art’s rise on the auction market was evident in last fall’s sales; the spring auctions only make the trend more apparent.

“It’s a sea change,” said Amy Cappellazzo, a Contemporary art specialist at Christie’s. And the primary cause is supply.

“There’s an inherent scarcity of great Impressionist material and the price point has become very high for strong examples,” she says. At the same time, well-known living artists have continued to produce new work, new artists have emerged and public acceptance of adventurous art has grown. “What was considered radical a few years ago seems less radical now,” Cappellazzo said.

In this spring’s auctions, works made four or five decades ago brought the highest prices: $16.3 million for a classic 1958 painting by Abstract Expressionist Mark Rothko, followed by $5.2 million apiece for a 1949 drip painting by Jackson Pollock and a 1958 signature blue abstraction by Yves Klein. But “Miss ko2,” a 6-foot-tall painted fiberglass sculpture of a sexy, miniskirted secret agent inspired by a popular Japanese cartoon -- made a mere seven years ago by Takashi Murakami -- sparked furious competition and was sold for $567,500.

Phillips did a brisk business in works priced at $500,000 or less -- many of them by artists who are relatively new to the auction market -- at its primary sale Thursday night. The roster included five works from Enron Corp., which was forced to liquidate its art collection. The Enron items captured attention because of the corporation’s infamous financial scandal but didn’t command particularly high prices. The most expensive Enron piece was a giant red vinyl light switch by Claes Oldenburg, which fetched $405,500. Four additional Enron consignments were sold on Friday at prices ranging from $10,755 to $113,525.

The Contemporary art auctions were far from a runaway success. Works bearing the highest pre-sale estimates at all three of the big-ticket evening sales -- a mixed-media stage set by Robert Rauschenberg at Sotheby’s, a painting by Arshile Gorky at Christie’s and a painting by Klein at Phillips -- failed to find buyers.

But observers tied that more to general market malaise than to the intrinsic value of the artworks. The art market has been “tricky” during the last eight months, said Lucy Mitchell-Innes, the former head of Contemporary art at Sotheby’s, who now runs a high-profile gallery on Madison Avenue with her husband, David Nash.

“The market doesn’t like conflict,” she said, referring to the war in Iraq and its aftermath. That makes Christie’s record sale “all the more remarkable. I haven’t seen that much excitement in years.”

Still, she wasn’t particularly surprised about the works that commanded the biggest prices. The market for contemporary art has become “more mature and consistent,” said Mitchell-Innes, since the boom in the late ‘80s and bust in the early ‘90s. Classic works from the ‘50s to the ‘80s by established artists tend to sell well in good times and bad.

“Some people who still have money and don’t want to put it in the stock market figure they might as well buy art and look at it,” she added.

This state of affairs has evolved over the 30 years in a trajectory that peaked in 1989, then fell abruptly and started a long, slow climb.

The sale of New York taxi mogul Robert Scull’s Pop art collection in 1973 marks “the beginning of the Contemporary art market as we know it,” Cappellazzo said. He cashed in, to the tune of $2.2 million -- including $85,000 for “Thaw,” a mixed media work by Robert Rauschenberg that Scull had purchased 15 years earlier for $900.

That auction created a sensation. Artists booed from the audience as they watched Scull reap the rewards of buying low and selling high. Feminists protested the paucity of women’s work and cabbies picketed for higher wages. After the sale, Rauschenberg reportedly punched Scull and accused him of profiteering.

The Scull affair also got the attention of auction house officials, who began to see a greater potential in art that had not stood the test of time. By the mid-1980s, Sotheby’s and Christie’s were holding regular auctions of Contemporary art in New York each spring and fall.

Meanwhile, prices rose. “Two Women,” a signature painting by Abstract Expressionist Willem de Kooning, was sold for $1.2 million in 1983, becoming the first Contemporary artwork to reach the million-dollar mark in a public auction. By 1989, when the market peaked, 70 contemporary artworks had been auctioned for $1 million or more.

Sometimes much more. The record price paid for a work by Pop artist Jasper Johns jumped from $4.1 million for “Diver” in 1987 to $7 million for “White Flag” in 1988 and, just a day later, to $17 million for “False Start.” De Kooning’s prices also skyrocketed, to $20 million paid for his painting “Interchange” in 1989. In the same year, Pollock’s “Number 8” was sold for a record $11.5 million.

Many of the records set during that period have yet to be broken. But the market for each artist’s work seems to run its own course. Andy Warhol’s “Orange Marilyn” was sold for a record $17.3 million in 1998. This spring, his work commanded up to $5 million, for a portrait of Marlon Brando, but several of his pieces went back to their consigners, unsold.

All things considered, most people in the Contemporary art trade were encouraged by the sales.

“Everybody watches the top few pieces, but only a handful of people play in that field,” says Richard Polsky, a private dealer in San Francisco and author of the recently published memoir, “I Bought Andy Warhol.” “Most people play in the [lower-priced] field of the day sales, and that area is pretty stable.

“We went into the season with a lot of apprehension, but now the war is over and the stock market has stopped falling,” he says. “The buyers were selective, but it was a good week for Contemporary art. It’s an indicator of its potential.”