The lure of impressionism for the newly rich

By Philip Hook
January 30 2009 23:58 | Last updated: January 30 2009 23:58

There was a dramatic increase in prices for the work of the impressionists through the 1950s. It was driven, as ever, by the new money of the time. The enormous shipping requirements of postwar reconstruction poured wealth into Greek shipowners’ pockets, as huge quantities of raw material and new products needed transportation round the world. A myth sprang up, an image of wealth informed by the lifestyles of Hollywood stars and Greek shipowners. One strand in the image of wealth formulated in the 1950s was the collecting of impressionist pictures.

The upward gear-change in glamour and price for impressionist pictures coincided with the emergence of the auction as the preferred means of sale for top examples. From the 1950s, the auction gave a public dimension to the acquisition of art, a process that had previously been a discreet and private one when handled by dealers. This was exciting to both sellers and buyers alike, the former because they often saw prices rising beyond what they had been led to expect, and the latter because works by Monet, Renoir and Degas took on the significance of captured battle standards, trophies won on the killing fields of the auction-room floor.
In May 1957, part of the collection of Margaret Thompson Biddle, an American, was consigned for auction to Paris. Gauguin’s “Still Life with Apples” was the star of the sale, making three times its estimate at $297,142. The New Yorker reported “a sudden desire to acquire the canvas which ignited simultaneously in the bosom of Mr Goulandris and Mr Stavros Niarchos, causing an explosion of human nature that blew the roof off the international art market”.

Two months later the William Weinberg collection, from New York, was offered at Sotheby’s in London. Judged by the highest standards, it wasn’t actually a very great collection but it included 10 Van Goghs. Peter Wilson, who became chairman of Sotheby’s in 1957 – and whose antennae responded as positively to marketability as quality in art – sensed its possibilities.

IT’S A RICH MAN’S WORLD
How much will the impressionists cost you?

Last June Claude Monet’s “Le Bassin aux Nymphéas” (1919) became the most expensive impressionist painting sold at auction when it raised £40,921,250 at Christie’s in London. The price almost doubled the previous impressionist record, set a month earlier, of £20.9m for another Monet, “Le Pont du Chemin de Fer á Argenteuil”. The list below shows the highest prices raised for pictures by five famous impressionists at Christie’s and Sotheby’s in the past three years, writes Rob Hastings.


CHRISTIE’S

Monet
“Le Bassin aux Nymphéas” (1919)
Sold in June 2008 at Christie’s London, £40.92m

Degas
“Danseuses à la Barre” (circa 1878)
Sold in June 2008 at Christie’s London, £13.48m

Renoir
“Grande Baigneuse aux Jambes Croisées” (1904)
Sold in May 2007 at Christie’s New York, £4.46m ($8.88m, all the conversions are based on exchange rate at time of sale)

Sisley
“La Route de Hampton Court” (1874)
Sold in May 2006 at Christie’s New York, £1.05m ($1.92m)

Pissarro
“Les Quatres Saisons” (1872)
Sold in November 2007 at Christie’s New York, £6.98m ($14.6m)


SOTHEBY’S

Monet
“Nymphéas” (1904)
Sold in June 2007 at Sotheby’s London, £18.5m

Degas
“Danseuse au Repos” (c 1879)
Sold in November 2008 at Sotheby’s New York, £23m ($37m)

Renoir
“La Loge or L’Avant-Scène” (1874)
Sold in February 2008 at Sotheby’s London, £7.41m

Pissarro
“Maison de Paysans” (1892)
Sold in February 2008 at Sotheby’s London, £2.37m

Sisley
“Le Loing à Moret, en été” (1891)
Sold in February 2007 at Sotheby’s London, £2.93m

Sources: Christie’s; Sotheby’s

Having managed to persuade the executors to sell in London, he persuaded Sotheby’s board to engage advertising agency J Walter Thompson to handle pre-sale publicity. It was the sort of opportunity that PR men dream about, because the 10 Van Goghs were the self-same pictures that had been used in the 1956 film Lust for Life starring Kirk Douglas as Vincent van Gogh. Here was a chance to buy pictures by the heroically doomed artist that Hollywood was now making movies about; pictures that had actually been featured in that movie; the sort of pictures that the Hollywood star who played Van Gogh might hang on the walls of his own luxurious residence in real life.

Auction hype was raised to a new level. JWT pushed its luck by sending an invitation to view the sale to the Queen; Sotheby’s directors were amazed when Her Majesty turned up. JWT milked the event for all it was worth, putting about an unattributable story that the Queen had been particularly taken by Degas’s pastel “The Injured Jockey” and might be contemplating a bid herself. It was totally untrue but ratcheted up interest in the sale.

Finally there was the sale of Georges Lurcy’s collection, which took place in November at Parke-Bernet, the fine art auction house in New York.

If the Queen had viewed the Weinberg sale at Sotheby’s in London, then New York’s equivalent of royalty turned up in all their glory for the Lurcy sale. The Rockefellers, Fords, Vanderbilts, Goulandrises, Dillons, Chester Dales and Lehmans were all conspicuously present as the hammer came down on the first lot. The room was so crowded that Mrs Niarchos had to be given a chair in the wings of the stage. A witness recorded that Eleanor Roosevelt sat beside Helena Rubinstein: “Miss Rubinstein dressed as a rich gipsy, Mrs Roosevelt as the most stolid librarian.” Art auctions were taking their place with society weddings and firstnights at the ballet as places to be seen.

. . .

Through 1957, record price followed record price for impressionist paintings. The market had become truly international; wherever you offered a great Manet or Renoir or Cézanne, it would be competed for by the same moneyed jet-setting group. Sotheby’s Peter Wilson understood this as well as anyone. He also realised something else. When the New York lawyers acting for the Weinberg estate originally sent letters to Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Parke-Bernet soliciting quotations for sale by auction, they were struck by the varied responses received. Parke-Bernet offered to take on the sale but at a commission rate of 23.5 per cent.

Christie’s reply was polite and mildly interested but it didn’t arrive for three months (possibly because they only sent their letter by seamail). Wilson, on the other hand, was on the telephone to New York the same day that he received the lawyers’ inquiry and soon after was offering the executors a knock-down commission rate of 8 per cent. Lack of auction tax gave London an enormous advantage over New York and Paris, which Wilson exploited to the full. This was one of the reasons why, when the plum of the Jakob Goldschmidt impressionist collection became available for sale the next year, Wilson managed to get that for Sotheby’s London too.

There were seven of them: three Manets, two Cézannes, a Van Gogh and a Renoir. They were all of outstanding quality and the decision to offer them in a stand-alone sale of just seven lots was an inspired one. It simultaneously emphasised the auction as an event of unparalleled glamour and importance, and focused attention on the works themselves, undiluted by anything less than a masterpiece. Auction rooms by tradition were functional wholesalers, clearing houses for goods that happened to be works of art. In London in the 1950s there was still sawdust on their floors. Presentation and marketing to the ultimate consumer was generally left to glamorous dealers with luxury galleries for the purpose. But now the sawdust was swept up and plush new carpeting laid down. With events such as the Weinberg and the Lurcy sales, the auction houses had not only invaded dealers’ territory but also shown they were even more powerful marketers than their rivals.

The Goldschmidt sale took the process several steps further. The decision to hold the auction in the evening and to require those who attended to wear dinner jackets, as if it were some gala theatrical event, increased the hype. Wilson once again employed an outside firm to handle the promotion of the sale. Press previews were held and journalists were asked to guess which picture they thought would sell for the most. A month before the auction, there had already been articles publicising it in newspapers and magazines in 23 different countries. Particular attention was paid to Goldschmidt’s son Erwin, who with his beautiful wife Madge projected an image of svelte prosperity.

In one of the earliest auctions at which the impressionists sold their work, at Drouot in Paris in March 1875, the police had been called to eject the hecklers. On the evening of 15 October 1958, it was the turn of the London police to be called to a sale room but this time to control the crowds surging up Bond Street towards Sotheby’s, trying to gain admittance to see the sale of the works of the same Impressionists. Those who did get in included Kirk Douglas (fresh from his cinematic role as Van Gogh), Anthony Quinn (who played Gauguin in the same film), Dame Margot Fonteyn, Somerset Maugham and Lady Churchill. Edward G Robinson was linked in by transatlantic telephone.

The Manet self-portrait fetched £65,000, and then the Manet portrait of Madame Gamby reached £89,000. There was the electricity of success in the air, increasing in voltage with each bid. With the third lot the, £100,000 barrier was broken when Manet’s “Rue Mosnier with Flags” sold for £113,000, a record auction price for a modern picture. “The grey head of Somerset Maugham shook slowly in amazement,” reported the Daily Express. “Dame Margot Fonteyn, in an off-the-shoulder, eau de nil dress, stood on her famous toes craning with excitement.”

The next lot, the Van Gogh, broke the record set by its predecessor, when it made £132,000. The Cézanne still life, lot five, sold for £90,000. Lot six was Cézanne’s “Garçon au Gilet Rouge”. For the third time in the space of four lots, the world-record price was beaten as the bidding surged to £140,000. It continued further, to the gasps of the room, as a duel developed between George Keller, of New York’s Carstairs Gallery, and Roland Balay of Knoedler’s. Keller finally won out, with a staggering bid of £220,000. “Two hundred and twenty thousand pounds?” Peter Wilson queried with mock surprise from the rostrum. “What, will no one offer any more?” The final lot, “La Pensée” by Renoir, fetched £72,000, the only picture bought by a British buyer (Birmingham property magnate Jack Cotton).

A week later the identity of the client for whom Keller had bought Cézanne’s “Garçon au Gilet Rouge” was revealed. It was the great American collector Paul Mellon. To the question of whether he had paid too much, his answer was emphatic: “You stand in front of a picture like that, and what is money?” It was a quotation that Sotheby’s and Christie’s could have printed on the first page of every impressionist catalogue, perhaps in lieu of a pre-sale estimate.

What was it that attracted new rich collectors to Renoirs and Cézannes? The answer lies partly in their accessibility, in the appeal of their colouring and subject matter. But there was another factor: the security of the expertise that established them as unassailably genuine. There was always room for critical uncertainty over Old Masters. But thanks to the foresight of early dealers such as Durand-Ruel and Bernheim-Jeune, who insisted on keeping comprehensive photographic records of work of the artists they handled, it was relatively easy to establish unchallengeable catalogues raisonnés of the entire oeuvres of the major impressionist painters. So if you were a Greek shipowner, a Hollywood film star, or a London property magnate, and you didn’t necessarily know very much about art but you wanted to buy it, you could be sure the Manet or Monet you had your eye on was the real thing.

. . .

The history of a specific painting, Renoir’s smaller version of “La Loge”, probably painted in 1874, provides a fascinating overview of the growing demand for impressionism over the past century and a quarter. In the first impressionist auction at Drouot in March 1875 it sold for FFr220; in 1912, at the sale in Paris of the collection of the industrialist Jean Dollfus, it fetched FFr31,200.

Coming up once more at Christie’s New York at the height of the Japanese boom in May 1989, it made $12.1m. Offered again in the dog-days of 1993, it was a measure of the extent to which confidence in the market had been undermined that it failed to attract a bid against an estimate of $6m to $8m. Then, in February 2008 it came up at Sotheby’s where it was competed for by a bevy of newly rich bidders from all quarters of the globe, and finally sold for $14.8m. The show was on the road again, underpinned by a much broader-based interest now that Russian, Asian and Middle Eastern wealth was competing with that of America and Europe for the great impressionist prizes.

The other thing that the story of “La Loge” tells us very clearly is that impressionist paintings are investment vehicles too. Extraordinary accelerations have since been punctuated by one exceptional dip in the 1990s but the underlying tendency of prices is an upward one. It must be, given the finite quantity of impressionist paintings available to the market and their long-established desirability. If there is an art market equivalent of a blue-chip stock, it is a major impressionist painting. History suggests that there will be a reliable return on it over the years. It is a lesson not lost on today’s buyers.

This is an edited extract from ‘The Ultimate Trophy: How the Impressionist Painting Conquered the World’ by Philip Hook (Prestel, £17.99), published on February 23