Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic London\u2019s auctions of upscale 20th- and 21st-century art this week painted a picture of a market adjusted to the realities of wider political and economic volatility. As news of President Donald Trump\u2019s turbulent tariffs on the US\u2019s trading partners spread through the salerooms at Sotheby\u2019s, Christie\u2019s and Phillips, the repeated mantra of attendees was that \u201cgood things will still sell\u201d. The art market\u2019s current challenge is to prise \u201cgood things\u201d from sellers who would rather wait for better times.\u00a0As a result, volumes were down more than a quarter on last year\u2019s equivalent sales, while values fell even deeper, by a third, to total \u00a3208mn (including the auction house fees). The bulk of this came courtesy of Christie\u2019s, with by far the bigger and better sale this season, boosted by its surrealism specialism, though its \u00a3130mn haul was still considerably down on last year\u2019s \u00a3197mn.\u00a0One advantage of the smaller-sized auctions is that there is less that can go wrong. While last year 20 works were withdrawn at the last minute (10 per cent of the lots), usually because sellers got cold feet, this year only nine suffered the same fate (6 per cent). Similarly, 12 per cent of art went unsold last year, while this fell to 8 per cent last week. It might seem slim pickings, but there are signs that the auction houses are reading the market better \u2014 and managing to persuade their clients to settle for more realistic reserves and estimates \u2014 which injected a sense of necessary stability into the salerooms.In a less risky environment, the previous cult of testing dozens of nearly new works is very much a thing of the past \u2014 with exceptions that prove the rule including a bird\u2019s-eye view of a woman lying on her back with a Marlboro Red cigarette by the New Jersey-based painter Danielle Mckinney at Christie\u2019s. This 2021 work, \u201cOther Worldly\u201d, was estimated between \u00a340,000 and \u00a360,000 and sold to a keen telephone bidder for an artist\u2019s record of \u00a3210,0000 (\u00a3264,600 with fees).\u00a0Still, this and most of the prices for art made after 2020 remained within the realms of art market reality. \u201cThere was so much aggressiveness and speculation in contemporary art before, it was unhealthy, particularly for young artists. A bit of a market shock helps,\u201d says Rome gallerist and 20th-century art specialist Mattia De Luca, in town for the sales.In general, works that peaked this season were, like Mckinney\u2019s, immediately impactful and, frankly, Instagram-friendly. Lisa Brice\u2019s \u201cAfter Embah\u201d (2018), a glorious, red-backed painting of confident female muses, models and musicians \u2014 including one in the pose of rapper Nicki Minaj \u2014 sold comfortably above estimate for \u00a34.4mn (\u00a35.4mn with fees) at Sotheby\u2019s, another artist record.\u00a0At the other end of the timescale, though equally visually arresting and in-demand, were surrealist works. Christie\u2019s separate section of 25 such pieces helped boost its evening total by nearly \u00a350mn and provided the deepest bidding of the week. Ren\u00e9 Magritte\u2019s trompe l\u2019oeil painting of a suited man standing on a moonlike sphere, \u201cLa reconnaissance infinie\u201d (1933), proved the top lot of the season, selling for \u00a38.7mn (\u00a310.3mn with fees). This work was bought in 2004 for \u00a3677,250.Disappointments were less about the works that didn\u2019t sell and more about some of the pre-hyped star lots that failed to fizzle \u2014 there were no easy wins this season. These included Francis Bacon\u2019s \u201cPortrait of Man with Glasses III\u201d (1963), a disquieting painting of a contorted face, which sold at Christie\u2019s on just one bid for a below estimate \u00a35.5mn (\u00a36.6mn with fees). At Sotheby\u2019s, Banksy\u2019s remix painting \u201cCrude Oil (Vettriano)\u201d (2005), sold by the co-founder of the punk-pop band Blink-182, landed within estimate, for \u00a33.5mn (\u00a34.3mn with fees) to an online bidder who didn\u2019t meet with much competition.The top-end auction market is increasingly concentrated in New York, where the estates of the US\u2019s many historic collectors and the tax pressures on their heirs bring troves of art in one go. In London \u201cit\u2019s about individual works and comes down to personal relationships,\u201d says Katharine Arnold, Christie\u2019s head of postwar and contemporary art, Europe. Gathering art \u201cwas hard work this season,\u201d she says, but they went about it by persuading consignors to offer pieces that chimed with the UK, notably its museum exhibitions, which put artists more in the limelight.So, at Christie\u2019s, were works by Jenny Saville (who has a forthcoming solo show at the National Portrait Gallery, sponsored by the auction house) and Monet (a pastel of London\u2019s Waterloo Bridge that chimed with the artist\u2019s recent showing at the Courtauld) while the Bacon was hanging in the National Portrait Gallery\u2019s acclaimed Human Presence exhibition until the start of this year. Among the handful of sought-after lots at Sotheby\u2019s was one by Yoshitomo Nara (a trademark sulky girl painting from 2005), who gets his first solo exhibition in the UK at the Hayward Gallery in June.Buying seemed mostly to come via the auction houses\u2019 US specialists, some manning two or three phones, while a collection of three works by the eerie surrealist Paul Delvaux all sold particularly strongly through a Christie\u2019s specialist based in Hong Kong. Sotheby\u2019s reported a high number of UK bidders, despite what chief executive Charles Stewart described as \u201ca bit of an exodus of the wealthy\u201d under the latest tax regime.Nonetheless, the spectre of New York\u2019s relative power in this market was never far away, not least as the auction houses took the opportunity to show off some of their forthcoming highlights during the London previews. At Sotheby\u2019s were works from a $80mn-$120mn group of Old Masters from the late, longtime partner and managing director of Morgan Stanley, Thomas Saunders, and his wife, Jordan. These include a pair of freely painted Frans Hals portraits of children (possibly the artist\u2019s) and a zinging \u201cStill Life with Cauliflower\u201d by 18th-century Spanish painter Luis Mel\u00e9ndez. Christie\u2019s showed off seven prime 20th-century works \u2014 including a 1922, red-dominated composition by Mondrian \u2014 from the $250mn collection of Leonard and Louise Riggio (the former was the founder of Barnes & Noble). All come for sale in New York in May.Still, it\u2019s a sign that things could be picking up more widely, despite the unpropitious backdrop, and London has often set the tone in the past. \u201cWe always go first [in the calendar year and after the summer break], it\u2019s our responsibility each time, and we\u2019ve shown that this market is stable,\u201d says Christie\u2019s Arnold. But, at the moment, the art scene needs such reassurance: \u201cWe are in a world that needs confidence.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic London\u2019s auctions of upscale 20th- and 21st-century art this week painted a picture of a market adjusted to the realities of wider political and economic volatility. As news of President Donald Trump\u2019s turbulent tariffs on the US\u2019s trading partners spread through the salerooms at<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":232582,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-232581","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-culture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/232581","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=232581"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/232581\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":232583,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/232581\/revisions\/232583"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/232582"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=232581"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=232581"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=232581"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}