The art market endures after a jittery 2019

Wealthy Americans stepped up to help calm the art market's jitters in 2019. Chris Carter reports.

There were some big art sales in 2019, but much of the action came within a month. Claude Monet’s Meules (1890) sold for $110.7m in New York with Sotheby’s in May, raising the nominal price bar for an Impressionist painting. That price was far in excess of the estimated $55m – a valuation that was 22 times higher than its previous auction sale price in 1986, but one that was justified in the eyes of Sotheby’s Impressionist department head August Uribe. It was, he said, “the best one” of the 25 paintings in the Haystacks series, still in private hands.

So maybe it wasn’t all that surprising that it made nine figures. After all, pre-sale estimates tend to be conservative and another painting from the series had sold for $81.4m in 2016 with Christie’s. The problem is, it was the only art work to make nine figures in 2019. And it only made nine figures once the fees had been added (the “hammer price” was $97m). Nonetheless, May also saw Jeff Koons’s Rabbit (1986) fetch a record price for a work by a living artist – $91.1m at Christie’s, again in New York. Robert Rauschenberg’s Buffalo II (1964) sold for $88.8m and Andy Warhol’s Double Elvis [Ferus Type] (1963) fetched $53m. That same month, Sotheby’s in New York sold a Pablo Picasso (Femme au chien, 1962), a Francis Bacon (Study for a head, 1952) and a Mark Rothko (Untitled, 1960), each for over $50m. All in all, not bad. “Wealthy Americans showed their backbone,” as Melanie Gerlis put it in the Financial Times.

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Chris Carter
Wealth Editor, MoneyWeek

Chris Carter spent three glorious years reading English literature on the beautiful Welsh coast at Aberystwyth University. Graduating in 2005, he left for the University of York to specialise in Renaissance literature for his MA, before returning to his native Twickenham, in southwest London. He joined a Richmond-based recruitment company, where he worked with several clients, including the Queen’s bank, Coutts, as well as the super luxury, Dorchester-owned Coworth Park country house hotel, near Ascot in Berkshire.

Then, in 2011, Chris joined MoneyWeek. Initially working as part of the website production team, Chris soon rose to the lofty heights of wealth editor, overseeing MoneyWeek’s Spending It lifestyle section. Chris travels the globe in pursuit of his work, soaking up the local culture and sampling the very finest in cuisine, hotels and resorts for the magazine’s discerning readership. He also enjoys writing his fortnightly page on collectables, delving into the fascinating world of auctions and art, classic cars, coins, watches, wine and whisky investing.

You can follow Chris on Instagram.