The auction business is booming as more and more Americans catch art-collecting fever
Those wily old Romans started it all. They developed the form of sale that became the auction, and used it to sell everything from statues to tapestries to palaces and, finally, the relics of their republic. They knew well that audio (literally, an increasing) was where the action was. They should be around today.
Not since the first hammer dropped to the highest bidder have sales of valuables commanded such audiences, such publicity, such prices. While anything that is relatively rare is sure to fetch a pretty penny at auction these days, things of beauty and lasting worth—"objects of virtue" to the trade—are going for sums that would boggle the I of Claudius. Ars gratia auctionis. Throughout the U.S. and the rest of the West, once listless salesrooms thrum with auctiophiliacs in search of a piece of the past; the top firms hold several simultaneous sales a day six days a week. In 1979 Sotheby's and Christie's, the two London-based giants of the international fine arts auction business, together have netted $702 million worldwide. Nor does anyone expect recession to cool the fever. Some indicators:
> A huge painting of scarlet lips suspended over a landscape, the work of American-born Dadaist and Photographer Man Ray, sold Nov. 5 at Sotheby Parke Bernet in Manhattan for $750,000. It was by far the highest price ever paid at auction for a surrealist work.
> Earlier this month in Manhattan, the highest amount ever brought by a poster at auction —$26,000—went for Toulouse-Lautrec's color lithograph of Parisian Cabaret Singer Aristide Bruant.
> A study for the Rodin sculpture Burghers of Calais—not the final work—went for $255,237 in Monaco. The price set a record for any Rodin bronze.
> A Picasso drawing, Téte Classique, fetched $210,000 in Manhattan—another record.
> In five days of November, impressionist, modern and contemporary art sales at SPB netted nearly $21 million, close to the firm's entire 1967-68 turnover.
"The whole scene is slightly crazy," said Leslie Waddington, a leading London dealer who attended the sales—and observed that few of the offerings were of premier quality. "It's public insanity."
No sale in years has come closer to craziness than Sotheby Parke Bernet's Auction 4290 in Manhattan on Oct. 25. It took only three minutes and 45 seconds to gavel down Frederic Edwin Church's The Icebergs for $2.5 million. That was the third highest bid ever made for a painting at auction* and more than twice as much as any other American work of art has ever fetched (see ESSAY). In all, the 264 works by 146 American painters of the 19th and 20th centuries posted a record for a sale of U.S. art: $6,750,950. The Icebergs, a flamboyant canvas by one of America's best landscapists, was bought by Texas Oilman Lamar Hunt. Despite its size (9 ft. by 5 ft.), weight (more than 500 lbs. with frame) and fame, the painting had disappeared for more than a century until it was rediscovered last June in a penny-pinched English juvenile home.