The Top Ten of the 1900s

Friday is Top day! Every other Friday, Artprice publishes a theme-based auction ranking. This week: the top ten sales of works from the 1900s.

The creative vitality of the 1900s was unprecedented. The new millennium witnessed the blossoming of modern man, the heyday of decorative, sensual and joyous Art Nouveau and the avant-garde ferment in Europe that spawned the very greatest artistic movements. It was the era of Post-Impressionism (1885-1905); Fauvism (1905-1910 with Matisse, Marquet, Van Dongen, Braque, Derain, Friesz, and Vlaminck); Naive Art (Henri Rousseau); Analytical Cubism (its most fertile period being between 1907 and 1912 with Braque and Picasso); Expressionism (the Die Brücle group was founded in 1905 by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Fritz Bleyl, Erich Heckel and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff in Dresden); Futurism (1904-1920, whose energy and velocity was expressed by Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni, Gino Severini and Luigi Russolo); and the pioneers of abstract art, Wassily Kandinsky, Frantisek Kupka, Kasimir Malevitch and Piet Mondrian.

Despite the plethora of first-rate artists who are now the pride of the world’s leading museums, only three have managed to break through the $30 million barrier to gain a place in our ranking. Pablo PICASSO alone claims half of the places in our Top Ten, leaving four places for Claude MONET and a final slot for Gustav KLIMT.

Once again, the main victor is Pablo Picasso, mainly thanks to Garçon à la pipe (1904), a transitional work between his Blue and Rose Periods, painted when he was just 24 years old. In 2004, Garçon à la pipe hit the headlines when it sold for $104 million ($93 million excluding the buyer’s premium), making it the world’s most expensive artwork at the time, and the first in history to break the $100 million barrier at auction (including the buyer’s premium). The young Garçon à la pipe was purchased by the Whitney collection in 1950 for $30,000, but its resale in 2004 broke the record held by Van Gogh‘s Portrait du Docteur Gachet, which sold for $82.5 million including buyer’s premium in 1990. By the end of 2004, Picasso’s sales had reached the grand total of $241 million (three times the 2003 amount), and he alone accounted for 6.7% of all global fine art sales.
1905 was an important year for Picasso, and not only for Garçon à la pipe. This was the year when he moved to Paris, to the Bateau-Lavoir. Here, he prepared for his first Paris exhibition, began his relationship with Fernande Olivier and met his American patrons, Gertrude and Leo Stein. A second work from 1905 claims a place in our Top Ten: Au Lapin agile evokes the famous Café de la Butte in Montmartre, a meeting place for artists such as Max Jacob, André Derain, Guillaume Apollinaire, Georges Braque, Maurice Utrillo, Amedeo Modigliani and, of course, Picasso himself. The artist gave the painting as a gift to the café’s owner, Frédé, who sold it for 1,000 francs in 1912. In 1989, the café scene Au Lapin agile sold for the equivalent of $34 million… Today, the work is exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
The other three Picasso paintings in our ranking are rare pieces from his Blue Period. The most famous of these, Les Noces de Pierrette, takes us back to the buying frenzy that gripped Japanese magnates in the late 1980s. In 1989, Japanese investment banker Tomonori Tsurumaki paid in excess of $48 million for Les Noces. His company, Nippon Tri-Trust, collapsed soon afterwards, and the painting ended up in the hands of the Hazama construction company, before being put up as collateral when the firm took a loan with the credit company Lake. Ownership of Les Noces de Pierrette then passed to GE Capital. Today it is secured in a vault, far away from the public gaze.

Claude Monet is the second major artist in our ranking, which includes four of his top six sales. This leading light of Impressionism is particularly sought after for his Nymphéas, the paintings that always attract the highest prices at auction. Almost half of his sales in excess of $10 million have been for works depicting water lilies. His record of $71.8 million ($80 million including buyer’s premium) was set by Le Bassin aux nymphéas, a 1919 painting that went under the hammer in June 2008. His most expensive work from the early 1900s is the Nymphéas painted in 1905, which sold for $39 million ($43.7 million including buyer’s premium) in 2012, after spending 33 years in the same collection. This is the second-highest price achieved by the artist at auction for a work from any period.

The third artist on our podium is Gustav Klimt with Birch Forest (1903), a work that sold for $36 million or $40.3 million including buyer’s premium. Birch Forest formed part of a special sale held at Christie’s on 8 November 2006, which included four major Klimt pieces. This was an unusual event, as his works rarely appear on the market. These paintings had been confiscated from the Bloch-Bauer family by the Nazis and Austria had only recently returned them to their rightful owners. The four canvases sold for some $192 million (excluding buyer’s premium), with the highest price of $78.5 million ($87.9 million including buyer’s premium) being set by Portrait d’Adele Bloch-Bauer II, dated 1912. Thanks to these exceptional results, Gustav Klimt’s value increased by 46% in 2006.

An unlikely masterpiece by Klimt; Monet’s Nymphéas, on the cusp between Impressionism and abstract art; Picasso’s mythical Rose and Blue Periods – this Top Ten of the 1900s presents a selection of modern treasures at prices that are not so unreasonable when we consider the healthy state of the market (even Jeff Koons has broken the $30 million barrier three times!)
In contrast to our previous rankings, these results do not all date from the 2000s. Two of them date back to 1989, a time when there was an unprecedented speculative bubble in the art market (between 1987 and 1990) and modern artists were shattering all previous records. The Japanese were the driving force behind these prices. They were omnipresent at every auction – from New York to London, from Paris to Tokyo. In 1989 alone they spent almost $2 billion on art. Today, the major buyers hail from the USA, China, Europe and the Middle East.