ArtMarket® Insight - what's trending on the art market

Nan Goldin’s photography of the intimate [10 Sep 2006]

Nan Goldin is an American photographer born in 1953 who built up an intimate journal of 30 years of shots. Life and work are indistinguishable for this artist who began by a near obsessive photographing of her family after her sister committed suicide. Later, she turned her lens on an extended family of friends and lovers.

ARTPRICE partners GOOGLE’s News Archive Search [06 Sep 2006]

Artprice is a partner in Google’s revolutionary new service “Google News archive search” that has just been launched. In the framework of the partnership agreement, Artprice has provided exclusive databases in 5 languages.

Maximilien Luce – impressionist heritage [29 Aug 2006]

Maximilien LUCE was one of the major artists of the neo-impressionist period. He was associated with Camille PISSARRO, Paul SIGNAC and Georges Pierre SEURAT who was probably the key figure of the neo-impressionist movement. During his life, i.e. between the 1880s and his death in 1941, Luce produced a large volume of work that includes oil paintings, lithographs and numerous drawings.<%/DESC%>

His favourite themes – which happen to be the most sought-after on the market – are the leisures and labours of the ordinary people of his epoch, as well as landscapes of Paris, Normandy and Brittany. As an ardent anarchist, Luce was particularly keen on depicting the living conditions of his working-class contemporaries in realist and everyday situations.

Cubist sculpture [28 Aug 2006]

As a Fine Art segment, the price index for Cubist sculpture contracted in 2005, but seems to be growing again this year.

MARCEL DUCHAMP – The art of provoking the art world [21 Aug 2006]

With just a handful of “ready-made” works, Marcel Duchamp turned a new page in Art History. These rare and emblematic pieces occasionally surface in UK and American auction rooms.

Successful launch of Artprice Decorative Arts [09 Aug 2006]

Artprice Decorative Arts®, the online marketplace for furniture, design, antiques, ceramics, collections, clocks and watches, military memorabilia and objets d’art, was launched two months ahead of schedule on 9 July 2006. Initial results confirm strong demand and Artprice’s powerful reputation in a market that is twelve times the size of the fine art market by turnover. The full data base of 90 million sale results complete with images will soon be available. This new venture means that Artprice can now cover 90% of the market for catalogued auction sales.

Avalanche of records at auction [08 Aug 2006]

A massive 6,130 artists have set new records at auction in the 2006 spring/summer season alone. And no fewer than 102 have broken the million dollar barrier this year.

TÀPIES & BARCELÓ – Two generations of Spanish “materialists”. [03 Aug 2006]

Antoni TAPIES and Miquel BARCELO have much in common, besides their Spanish origins. Both artists instil their works with an unusually powerful physical presence, through the density of the pictured surface which is scored, uneven, thickened, stained or overlaid with disparate materials.While Joan MIRO encouraged Tàpies to exploit the widest possible range of materials, Barceló was fascinated by André BRETON whose idea of the fortuitous meeting (of objects and ideas) perhaps inspired his experimental quest that led him to incorporate sand and ash, ceramic and bone into his art.

Global Fine Art auction sales turnover: up 48.2%! [25 Jul 2006]

The 2006 spring/summer sales season has been one of the most dynamic ever recorded by Artprice. Compared to the first half of 2005, the global figure for total Fine Art sales revenue is showing the incredible growth rate of +48.2%. The figure is today 4 times what it was 10 years ago.

Cindy SHERMAN [17 Jul 2006]

From the outset of her photographic career in the 1970s, Cindy Sherman was already making portraits of herself…momentarily…as someone else. Over 30 years, she has created a portrait gallery of social and cultural stereotypes from the 20th and 21st century. After the Untitled Film Stills, her most celebrated series are Centerfolds (1981) – inspired by fashion photography, Disasters (1984-1986) – a series of nightmarish fairy-tales, History Portraits (1988-1990) – which parodies historical masterworks, Sex Pictures (1992) depicting dismembered dolls, and the burlesque series Clowns (2003-2004).

Photography is booming [04 Jul 2006]

The photography market is in rude health. Prices have risen another 30% in the last twelve months (+207% in ten years) and new records are becoming commonplace, both for modern and for contemporary images.

VIENNESE ACTIONISM – The price of blood [27 Jun 2006]

Viennese Actionism is an Austrian revolutionary avant-garde movement that was active between 1962 and 1968. Its principal figures – Nitsch, Muehl, Brus and Schwarzkogler – enacted violent performances with sacrificial overtones, designed to free individuals from their repressions, break social constraints, generally challenge assumptions and ultimately, through the medium of instinctive outpourings, to rediscover an implacable liberty. This provocative movement can only be understood in the context of an Austria wracked by the horrors of the second world war and stifled by its own inner feelings of guilt. Hitler after all was Austrian.

The London School [19 Jun 2006]

British figurative art came into being in 1976 with The Human Clay, an exhibition organised by R. B. Kitaj. Lucian Freud (born 1922) and Francis Bacon (1909-1992) accompanied by Frank Auerbach (1931), Leon Kossof (1926), Michael Andrews (1928-1995) and Ronald Brooks Kitaj (1932), met in the Colony Room in Soho, London and offered an alternative to the mainly abstract painting of the post-war era.In opposition to the abstract movement and the predominance of colour in painting, the London School stands for “realistic” painting, which aims to get behind surface appearances to reveal the inner truth of the subject. It is painting that intentionally provokes by showcasing subjects that are often utterly unattractive and in crude postures.

COBRA – “Vehement painting” [30 May 2006]

With a price index showing 160% growth over 10 years and a market now in very short supply of major works, the prices of COBRA works look set to continue rising.

Speculation in New York [28 May 2006]

At the end of the prestigious May sales, the average price of works negotiated in New York auction rooms was up by 56% compared to that registered at the peak of the speculative bubble in 1990. Over recent months, the rate of inflation observed on the American art market since 1999 has considerably accelerated and since April 2005 average sales prices in New York have risen by 49.6%!

Contemporary art: record prices! [22 May 2006]

New York sales of contemporary art have confirmed the exceptional dynamism of this market in mid season. Over three days – from 9 to 11 May – Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Phillips managed to sell no less than 77 works of contemporary art over the USD 1 million mark. During May 2005, only 44 pieces reached the 1 million mark, and in May 2001 the figure was just 24.

PICASSO ENGRAVINGS – An abundant, but complex market [21 May 2006]

The most famous 20th century painter was also a very gifted sculptor, assembler, pioneer into unknown artistic territories… and engraver. Between 1899 and 1973, Picasso produced over 2000 engravings. His insatiable curiosity and his appetite for challenges underpinned a prolific and varied output covering a whole range of different engraving techniques, including techniques invented by himself.Engravings therefore make up a very significant element of Picasso’s oeuvre, but should not be acquired without discernment.

Artprice announces upcoming launch of Artprice Decorative Arts [14 May 2006]

In 2005, Artprice turned itself within a year into the world’s leading marketplace for fine art, with nearly 34,000 works offered for sale every day and 90,000 daily visitors, up by 93% between October 2005 and April 2006.

Artprice’s popularity, and its new Artpricing estimate service, have also revealed massive demand for trading and for pricing data in Furniture and the Decorative arts, particularly among its clients.

GERMAN PHOTOGRAPHY – From reality to fiction [10 May 2006]

Bernd and Hilla Becher are the leading lights of “objective” photography in Germany. Their approach refutes the anecdotal and focuses on inventorying anonymous “industrial sculptures” that appear throughout our environment. The radicalism of their documentary work had a strong impact on their students including Andreas Gursky, Thomas Ruff, Thomas STRUTH and Candida HÖFER. This later generation of photographers assimilated much of the Becher’s approach, although sometimes freeing itself from the “objective” view of reality by altering their images. From an auction and museum preference point of view, the later generation seems to have become more popular than the objective purism of the Becher period.

Picasso portrait of Dora Maar becomes the world’s second most expensive painting [04 May 2006]

Just two years after setting the world auction record for his Garçon à la Pipe (sold for USD 93 million on 5 May 2004), Pablo Picasso came close to repeating the feat when a 1941 portrait of his muse, Dora Maar, was knocked down for USD 85 million at Sotheby’s prestigious Impressionist & Modern Art evening sale.

La Force de l’Art at the Grand Palais [03 May 2006]

“La Force de l’Art” opens to the public from 9 May to 25 June, bringing together fifteen exhibitions for the first of a new triennial series of shows intended to restore France to the forefront of the international art scene.

Explosion of prices in New York [26 Apr 2006]

Art prices continued to climb in the first quarter of 2006. In the middle of the spring/summer auction season and a few days ahead of the prestigious “Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale” in New York, the Artprice Global Index shows that prices rose a further 16% over just four months! Since the beginning of the year, 117 lots have already exceeded the million dollar mark, compared with only 66 over the same period in 2005.

The Views of Venice at the top of Old Masters sales [25 Apr 2006]

Within the Painting segment, Old Masters works have always been considered as safe-haven assets, compared with modern or contemporary works. And the figures tend to confirm this trend. While prices for modern and contemporary paintings have climbed 33.2% and 41.1% respectively since April 2001, demand for pre-19th century paintings is today at the same level as five years ago.

David Hockney [23 Apr 2006]

Born in 1937 in Bradford (Yorkshire), David Hockney entered the Royal College of Art in London in 1957. In the 1960s, he moved away from abstract expressionism and began experimenting with figurative art combining abstract, figurative and pop art. He began producing engravings in 1961. A few years later when he had moved to Los Angeles, he began applying new light and colours to his work. His work became naturalistic and more autobiographical. He painted interior scenes and his famous swimming pools, in particular The Bigger Splash which won him international acclaim. He also produced numerous portraits, often of close family members or friends. From the 1970s, he started dedicating more time to large-format double portraits, an aspect he would apply later in his watercolours.

Hans Bellmer (1902-1975) [18 Apr 2006]

Surrealist Hans Bellmer is on show at the Musée National d’Art Moderne (Paris) until May 22.In 1933, Hans Bellmer made a Doll, an artificial “being” of wood, papier mâché and a biomorphed anatomy “with multiple anatomical possibilities”. This was the start of a subversive process that challenged the myth of anatomical perfection promoted by the third Reich. He dismembered his Doll’s body and recombined it in incongruous combinations to evoke the feeling of “disturbing strangeness” he had discovered on reading Freud. Bellmer never showed his dolls as exhibits during his lifetime, using them merely as models for the formal work of his paintings, drawings, engravings or photographs.

HYPERREALISM – “Clichés” of reality… [09 Apr 2006]

Hyperrealism, which emerged in the USA in the 60s, inherits its attachment to a banal everyday version of reality from Pop art. The artists draw their subjects from real life; but it is a “second-hand” real life, because they do not create their works directly in front of the person or thing they are depicting, but from photographs. They demonstrate a great, often laborious, technical virtuosity, to transcribe a reality that has been examined under a microscope.

OP ART – The optical illusionists are back [02 Apr 2006]

Op Artists exploit the way the retina works to induce a series of apparent metamorphoses on the flat unchanging surface of their pictures. They ensnare our vision with optical illusions, playing with the phenomenon of retinal afterimages and with the changing position of the viewer in front of the painting.

A boom in the drawings market [20 Mar 2006]

For the past 15 years, collectors and curators of drawings have met at the Salon du Dessin during the last week of March. The salon that is to be held at the Palais de la Bourse in Paris will bring together some 30 galleries that will exhibit almost 1,000 drawings from all periods.

Auction data in 2005 showed that the drawings segment represented almost 24.4% of total Fine Art transactions and 12.7% of turnover (vs. 11.6% in 2004).

Installations [15 Mar 2006]

With the emergence of a mass consumer society in the 1950s in the United States, and then later in Europe, the notion of disposability became an integral part of Western lifestyles. The significant changes in habits and mentalities that accompanied the new lifestyle had an impact on our conception of art. Previously considered eternal, art began to reflect current realities and many artists emancipated themselves from the desire to produce perennial works. Art can also be ephemeral and temporary. Collectors have recognised this and have invested in works whose preservation often presents a number of challenges. They are aware that museums are also keen to enrich their collections of installations that can be, in some cases, very fragile.

Art Market Trends 2005 [08 Mar 2006]

Art Martket Trends 2005 – historic figures Contents Art price latest trends The popular segments of the market New York: prices surge by 34.5% London: A first exceptional season! France contributes 6.6% in 2005 Hong Kong ranks fourth in the market The most buoyant art movements of 2005 TOP 10 ARTISTS TOP 100 auction records […]