London fine art auction prices on the rise

Recent sales at the main London art auction hoses point to the market continuing its slow return to more buoyant conditions.

Over the past three years, sales from the contemporary art sales at Christie's and Sotheby's have moved from £22.million in February 2009 to £79.5million in February 2010 and £83 million this year. Last week Sotheby’s sold 54 out of the 59 lots offered for £30 million.

Christie's had a sale of £20 million, which included a self-portrait by Andy Warhol that went for £9.6 million -- well up on the estimate of £3 million. The Self-portrait, Janus, in red and black, also tripled the value of a similar but smaller work sold in 2004 for roughly £3.5 million at Christie's.

Warhol was also represented at Sotheby's by an iconic Marylin Monroe. Her face, repeated nine times in negative in Nine Multicoloured Marilyns fetched £2.8 million. That result was in itself a sign of the recovery, since an exactly similar work that Christie's hoped to sell for $2.8 million remained unsold on October 19, 2008, at the beginning of the global financial crisis.

Between 1996 and 2000, works from the Nine Multicolored Marilyns series changed hands for between £200,000 and £400,000 at auctions.

The two days of sales generated some memorable results. The Sotheby's sale opened with the famous pile of 100,000 sunflowers seeds in porcelain by Weiwei AI, offered for between £80,000 and £120,000 and which fetched £290,000. During the sale, thousands of similar hand-painted grains were strewn over the floor of the Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern where the Chinese artist’s work is on show (until May 2).

Less known, the Swiss artist Franz Gertsch created a whole series portraying a certain Luciano Castelli, of which Luciano I (1976) doubled its high estimate (which was already a record price). As works by this artist are rare at auction, the piece fetched £1.3 million. The same day, Sotheby's got very close to a new record with Juan Muñoz’s Conversation Piece in bronze.

This unique work had been in a private collection since 1993. It depicts a father tenderly leaning over his son and seems to have seduced the Sotheby’s audience: the bidding went all the way to £2.7 million. A year earlier, not two but six man-sized bronze statues by the artist, Conversation Piece III, sold for a similar price, a record at £2.9 million at Sotheby’s (May 12, 2010).

Worth mentioning also: Glenn Brown’s Declining Nude, which fetched the artist’s second best-ever auction price at £1.1 million behind his Dali-Christ, which sold for £1.25 million at Christie’s on June 30, 2010.

Other successful sales were Günther Uecker’s Lichtfeld, estimated at £300-400,000 and which fetched £620,000, and Gerhard Richter's Abstraktes Bild, which had been guaranteed a sale by Sotheby’s. It sold for £6.4 million.

At Christie’s, the first lot – a somewhat disturbing sculpture by Dinos & Jake Chapman, Two Faced Cunt – fetched an excellent price. Its inclusion in the famous Sensation exhibition by Charles Saatchi is the "stamp" that allowed the work to triple its estimate (£60,000). After that, the best results rewarded (apart from Warhol) Martial Raysse for whom a record was expected for L'année dernière à Capri (titre exotique), estimated £1-1.5 million. And indeed it came…the work went under the hammer at three times its estimate.

An exceptional piece, the work fetched £3.6 million. New records were also signed by Jenny Saville (Branded, £1.3 million), Miquel Barcelo Tres equis, £1.1 million) and Adriana Varejao whose bloody revisits of Lucio Fontana’s slashes, Parede com Incisões a la Fontana II (Wall with Incisions a la Fontana II) sold for £950,000.