Bumper YSL sale shows art can be as good as gold Mon, 02 Mar 2009
With the International economy in the doldrums, the runaway success of last week's Yves Saint Laurent auction is unlikely to cause a sea change on the flagging European art market, but experts believe it can boost investment in art. Held over three days in a prestigious Paris hall, the once-in-a-lifetime YSL sale fetched 373.5 million euros (US$472 million dollars), making it the biggest private art sale in history.
In some long 20 hours of bidding, the 1,200 seated buyers and foreigners calling through 100 telephone operators, smashed 25 records for artists as well as setting fresh records for silver and Art Deco.
"People told me to wait to sell until after the crisis," said Saint Laurent's companion Pierre Berge.
"But finally I think I was right because when you put quality works up for sale, the buyers are there."
The YSL/Berge collection however was in every way exceptional -- a giant 733-piece collection assembled over five decades that brought together a variety of pieces from antiquity to contemporary times and ranged from oils to chairs to silver.
"It was exceptional, but it was a one-off sale," said Francois de Ricqles, the vice president of Christie's France, which organised the sale.
"It will have an effect on Paris' place on the global art market, but not on global prices."
The last record for a private collection was set in New York in 1997 with the sale of the Victor and Sally Ganz collection, which fetched 163 million euros ($US207 million dollars).
While a handful of record art sales cheered the market over the last months, times have been monotonously bleak on the auction front, with much-hyped contemporary works in free-fall, and even headline artists such as Francis Bacon failing to find buyers.
But experts said that at the Saint Laurent event, the works were magnificent and the prices right.
A Christie's competitor, who asked not to be named, said it would help people "understand that art is a good long-term investment, that works such as these turn a profit over 20 or 30 years, and that buying art is also buying pieces you can live with and enjoy, just as Berge and Saint Laurent did."
Leaving no stone unturned, Christie's toured star pieces to potential buyers in New York, London and Brussels. Some 600 high-end buyers and museums able to afford some of the more prestigious multi-million-dollar works were offered private viewings inside the late Saint Laurent's apartment ahead of the sale.
While US, European and Asian buyers were at hand, dealers said Russians were off the market.
New York dealer John Herring, who bought a work worth over 200,000 euros, told AFP he was cheered to see "that art is still selling."
"I think this auction may give people confidence that art is still a commodity that people are ready to pay for," he said.
"There's still lots of money around but the psychology is the problem. Here you can see people buying, and that gives confidence."
French auctioneer Dominique Ribeyre was of the same opinion. "This sale is comforting," he said. "The big dealers are here along with collectors who have money."
Seeing works purchased by the YSL/Berge couple decades earlier fly through the roof showed that "art is a safe investment. Someone who bought an oil for 30 million euros did not make a bad deal, and definitely not as bad as investing in financial products."
Bucking the credit crunch, the sale exceeded expectations and revived French dreams of seeing Paris recover its place as a major global art market capital.
"Tonight Paris reintroduced itself as the world's market centre," said Christie's CEO Edward Dolman.
The first day alone ushered in seven world records for modern artists -- including Matisse, Mondrian, Klee and Brancusi. A Matisse, the most expensive work sold during the auction, went for 35.9 million euros (46.5 million dollars).
And day two saw a new frenzy of bids for Art Deco works, clinching the sale of the 20th century's most expensive piece of furniture -- a leather armchair by Irish designer Eileen Gray -- for 21.9 million euros (28.2 million dollars).
Pictured:
The National Gallery of Australia has paid nearly NZ$1.3million for Edgar Degas Femme a sa toilette (Woman bathing) at the Yves Saint Laurent sale in Paris. Gallery director Ron Radford said, ''I am thrilled that we were successful in securing this major pastel by Edgar Degas who is one of the most influential and talented French artists of the 19th century. It was estimated to fetch $NZ400,000 - 600,000 and fetched NZ$1,300,000.
