The art market in great shape

If there is one place where everything is obviously going well, it is the art market. Auctions have been soaring throughout 2022, as Beaux Arts Magazine reports this month. Works of art for sale are reaching unprecedented amounts, the auction houses have a constantly rising turnover and historic records are constantly being broken. Journalist Armelle Malvoisin even speaks of an "insolent progression". It must be said that "the year 2022 has once again seen the arrival of new, very active buyers, in particular rich millennials familiar with online transactions". In short, young people are investing. And 2023 promises to be just as exciting for fans of memorable auction battles, given the art collections for sale that are on the horizon and the estates to come.

Looking back to 2019, the last year unaffected by the Covid epidemic, art auction house Christie's, which continues to dominate the high-end segment, doubled its turnover in 2022 to almost half a billion euros (€492m). This is the best result in its history, even if we refer to 2009, the famous miracle year when it sold the art collection of Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé. The sale on 14 June 2022 of the exceptional collection of works of art and objets d'art belonging to Hubert de Givenchy alone brought in €118.1m. Of which €27.1m was for a bronze sculpture by Alberto Giacometti, Femme qui marche

Femme qui marche - Alberto Giacometti

The American multinational art and collectibles auction house Sotheby's was obviously not left behind. It obtained €76.6m from the sale of the princely contents of the Hôtel Lambert, but also €48m from the sale of the second part of the collection of animal and plant creations of Dorothée Lalanne, daughter of the famous sculptor couple François-Xavier and Claude Lalanne. It reached a historic turnover of €418m in 2022. Excluding the Hospices de Beaune sale. Francis Picabia's oil on canvas, Pavonia, alone sold for €10m. A world record for the artist. It must be said that the Brexit has so discouraged the organisation of sales in London that Sotheby's has decided to repatriate its sales of surrealist artworks to France.

Pavonia - Francis Picabia

"In the ancient art market, quality and rarity create desire among collectors and museums," says Beaux Arts Magazine. Moreover, among the treasures to be sold on the art market in 2022, another work of ancient art reached new heights at auction: a drawing by Michelangelo from the end of the 15th century was sold at Christie's for €23.1m. Another world record for the artist. May he rest in peace. At Aguttes, ranked last in the Top 6 French auction houses in 2022 (excluding autograph manuscripts by Einstein and Besso), Louyse Moillon's Nature morte à la coupe de fraises, panier de cerises, branche de groseilles à maquereaux (Still life with a bowl of strawberries, basket of cherries, branch of gooseberries) (1631), was sold for €1.6m. A 1736 violin by Bartolomeo Giuseppe Guarneri, "del Gesu", was sold for €3.38m, again at Aguttes.

"As a result of its policy of opening up to non-shareholder professionals, Drouot has seen an upturn in its auction room activity (€362m in 820 sales), while at the same time developing its online platform, which brought in €285m, driven by 6,451 live and online sales from French and foreign houses. Several brands are vying for fourth place in the individual rankings," writes Armelle Malvoisin. And it is Millon that is winning the game this year with €93.5m in sales. In particular, it sold a historic piece by the late-recognised American textile artist Sheila Hicks, Fugue, an assemblage of silk, linen and cotton mounted on eight panels and dating from 1969-1970, which sold for €687,500: a world record for the artist at auction. Other operators are doing well, of course, and private treaty art sales also increased significantly in 2022 at all auctioneers.

Fugue - Sheila Hicks

By launching the Vietnamese modern art market in 2014, Aguttes anticipated the renewed interest of collectors in the artists of the former Indochina, from the Hanoi School, some of whom moved to France in the late 1930s. Three of them are particularly sought after at present: Lê Phô (1907-2001), Vu Cao-Dam (1908-2000), and Mai Trung Thu (1906-1980), whose silk painting En plein air, estimated at €550,000 to €750,000, was sold for €794,720 in 2022. The year also saw the art auction house Bonhams Cornette de Saint Cyr take its turn in this niche, selling a bouquet of Peonies and Delphiniums painted by Lê Pho around 1960 for €120,000. But the highlight of the year at Bonhams Cornette de Saint Cyr was of course the sale of the Rousset collection of Asian art, which brought in €14.5m, thanks in particular to a rare wooden Bodhisattva sculpture from the Jin dynasty (1115-1234) sold for €3.3m.

The saga of the Aristophil collections, which has always been a strong point on the French art market, came to an end in 2022. A copy of the first edition of Nicolaus Copernicus' famous scientific text, published in 1543 and which revolutionised the conception of the universe, sold for €606,576, while a page of sketches for a fugue and two canons by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was sold for €546,000.  The sale of books, manuscripts and other documents had been held in 55 parts since 2017, under the leadership of auctioneer Claude Aguttes. True works of art for sale, just like the paintings and sculptures.