“It was mixed pickings,” said the dealer as he exited the salesroom, “but there were some unfashionable but very good early Impressionist pictures that we haven’t seen for a very long time. That’s the sort of picture that has fallen out of fashion.”
“Is there a crack in the market?” queried Mauro as she left the salesroom. “The market is reacting to the aggressive estimates and the auctioneer had a tough time drawing people out.”
Diana Picasso, a granddaughter of the artist who is compiling a catalogue raisonne of Picasso’s sculpture, looked somewhat surprised at the outcome, almost at a loss for words. “It’s a magnificent work and was properly estimated.”
Katya Kazakina got a different point of view from Marc Porter who runs privates sales for the firm:
Porter […] said the results were skewed by excessive presale estimates that a seller stipulated for 14 lots. “If you tease out that collection, you’d see a different result for the whole sale,” he said in an interview.
Carol Vogel went to a London dealer to pass her verdict:
“There were too many fillers with optimistic estimates,” James Roundell, a London dealer, said after the sale. “It was an auction that was not edited.”
Christie’s Limp $205-Million Sale Prompts Talk of “A Crack in the Market” (Artinfo.com)
Kandinsky Sells for Record $23 Million in Mixed N.Y. Sale (Bloomberg)
Art, Not Storm or Election, Is Blamed for Anemic Sale at Christie’s (NY Times)
