TEXT A In May 1995, Andrew Lloyd
Webber, creator of a string of international hit musicals and a very wealthy
man, spent U.S. ＄ 29.2 million on Picasso’s "Portrait of Angel Fernanders de
Soto". It was the highest price paid at auction for a painting since the art
market crashed in 1990. Lloyd Webber has a theory that Picasso’s
Blue Period paintings were influenced by Burne-Jones, the British Pre-Raphaelite
master whose international reputation stood high at the turn of the century. The
theory is not shared by many art historians, but that doesn’t matter to the
composer. He had been looking for a Blue Period Picasso for some time.
It is now extremely hard to come by Blue Period Picassos- figurative works
that are drenched in melancholy, expressed by a dominant use of blue. Blue
Period subjects par excellence are mothers and children or harlequins; Lloyd
Webber’s purchase is not the most attractive of them. He paid roughly double
what the picture was worth. He seems to have got carried away when the bidding
started to climb. The Picasso was one of the two highest prices
of the 1994-1995 auction season, and help illustrate what has been happening in
this curious market. The very rich have got their confidence back, which
has meant that buyers can be found for works of really outstanding quality and,
very occasionally, bidding battles have driven prices back to their 1989-1990
levels. The 1980s boom collapsed in 1990. After several false
dawns there are now signs that serious recovery has begun. More than an
expansion of the market, however, it reflects the relative weakness of the
American dollar, the currency in which most art deals are transacted. Collectors
from countries with stronger currencies have been finding dollar prices
cheap. The middle market is still fairly weak. It is not unusual
for up to half the lots on offer at a Christie’s or Sotheby’s sale to be left
unsold. Dealers, as opposed to auctioneers, are still finding it hard to make a
living and seldom buy for stock. The auctioneers have tried to replace them by
encouraging private people to buy directly at auction and more of them are
doing this. But private buying is unpredictable and cannot underpin the market
in the way dealer buying used to. Private individuals buy what they want; they
don’t bid on everything that is going cheap. Overall, the nature
of the market is changing. In the 1980s art was bought as a speculation: buy in
April, sell for double the price in September. This mentality vanished with the
1990 collapse, but the very rich and their financial advisors still take the
view that it is sensible to keep a percentage of your investment portfolio in
art. It is this kind of money that creates the fancy prices at the top end of
the market. Geographically, the present recovery has been led by
North America. Normally a major recession, such as was experienced in the United
States, results in a shift of taste. But the Americans liked Impressionist and
classic modern pictures best before the market collapse and that is what they
have been coming back to. It is currently the strongest sector of the picture
market. Contemporary and Old Master markets are still struggling and there are
few buyers for Victorian pictures, apart from Lloyd Webber.
Besides Europe and America, however, there is now a growing market in the
East. Indeed, the East has become the great hope of hard-pressed dealers over
the last three years —they have been aiming to find new buyers in Japan, Korea,
Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong and China. There are more rich
connoisseurs in Japan than anywhere else but they have not been in a buying
mood. Japanese speculators lost huge amounts of money in the 1990s crash and
there are few collectors who dare to buy any works of art today. The market in
Chinese ceramics, works of art, jade jewelry and old and modern brush paintings
is now dominated worldwide by wealthy collectors from Hong Kong, Taiwan and
Singapore. The huge volume of excavated art that is smuggled out of China has
dramatically weakened the archaeological end of this market but rarities,
especially the late imperial porcelains, are selling well. There have even been
two or three successful auctions inside China since 1994. The local millionaires
are beginning to put their money into art. ______ has the most potential art buyers.