Joanna Pitman

An insatiable appetite for art

Russia and Wall Street is fuelling saleroom fever

Never in living memory has there been so much interest in buying art as there is now. Across all categories, from Old Masters to Impressionists to photographs, but mostly in 20th-century paintings, the international appetite for buying art has been steadily building in an art-market bull run that has already lasted 11 years.

In the second week of February, London witnessed the highest totals ever recorded at auction in the European art market. In the course of five days, over £260 million was handed over for works of art ranging from blue-chip Impressionists to emerging contemporary names. Then, in New York last month, a mysterious middle-aged man spent $95 million at a Sotheby’s auction on Picasso’s portrait of his mistress, ‘Dora Maar with Cat’. Since then the auction house has notched up its highest ever sales in wine, Italian art, Indian art and Russian art. Christie’s has recorded a record turnover, reporting sales of £1.8 billion for 2005, a 30 per cent increase over the previous year.

The auction houses can barely contain their glee at the surging prices. ‘It’s definitely a seller’s market,’ says Oliver Barker, the head of the contemporary art department at Sotheby’s in London. ‘Experienced sellers, who don’t necessarily need liquid assets at this moment, can nevertheless see that there is a tremendous opportunity to sell.’

A combination of high-quality consignments, a heady auction atmosphere and an increasing range and number of extremely wealthy buyers has boosted prices dramatically over the last couple of years. Auctioneers are consistently being taken by surprise at the frequency and degree with which records are being broken. Prices for popular blue-chip names such as Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol seem to rise and rise. The record price for a work by Lichtenstein (the New York painter known for his blown-up comic strip art) has risen from $7 million to over $16 million in the last three years.

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