Auctioneer by appointment to the world’s new rich

In 1987, shortly after joining Christie’s auction house in London as a 23-year-old English Literature graduate from Oxford, Jussi Pylkkanen nervously approached the head of the Impressionists department, James Roundell, and asked if he could transfer to his team. ‘He was a kind of god in the company. He’d just sold Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” to a Japanese insurance company for almost $40 million. He was the most important man in Christie’s,’ recalls Pylkkanen. A year later, Pylkkanen joined the Impressionists department; 20 years on, he has replaced Roundell as the colossus of Christie’s European operations. Pylkkanen is the president of Christie’s Europe and the company’s top-flight auctioneer this side of the Atlantic. Last month he presided over a week of auctions in London that realised £200 million, and broke price records for 17 artists. Forty-two lots sold for over £1 million.

One has come to think of the £1 million painting as pretty commonplace these days, but now prices of up to £40 million are being fetched by single works of art and there seems to be no sign of the market’s current buoyancy subsiding.

‘I’ve seen two cycles in 21 years working in the art markets. The first boom I saw was from 1987 to 1989 when lots of artworks sold for multi-million-dollar prices. Christie’s and Sotheby’s started chasing the big sales after “Sunflowers” was sold, and a number of paintings were sold for £10 million plus. But it was a shallow market, fuelled with atypical money from banks and other financial services companies. In those days profitable companies were buying art to give themselves a bit of gloss. Today the market’s strength is quite different.’

Over the last seven or eight years, there has been consistent growth in the value of pictures. Several things have combined to produce this.