The classics never go out of style. And when it comes to art, the big money is flowing back to that which is tried and true.
After a stagnant few years, dealers are once again celebrating big comebacks from old names, with New York auction houses such as Christie’s, Phillips and Sotheby’s drumming up $2.2 billion in sales this fall.
Leading the haul, Austrian painter Gustav Klimt’s “Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer” which snagged a stunning $236.4 million at Sotheby’s. The painting, made between 1914 and 1916, was looted by Nazis and nearly lost in a fire before becoming part of the private art collection of Estée Lauder heir Leonard A. Lauder in 1983. He died this summer, leading to the sale.
Elsewhere, a 1940s self-portrait of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, “El sueño (la cama)” set a record for a sale by a female artist at $55 million last month after a “tense bidding war” between two collectors.
A few days before that, Christie’s “20th-Century Art Sale” brought in $690 million, led by a $62 million Rothko work, “No. 31 Yellow Stripe” from 1958. The auction also featured works by John Singer Sargent, Claude Monet, and David Hockney.
“It was a perfect storm,” Manhattan-based art dealer Helly Nahmad told The Post, explaining why the boom is happening now. “It’s hard to get great art and a lot of it came up for sale in November.”
Also, the estates of Lauder, Robert and Patricia Ross Weis and Jay and Cindy Pritzker brought pieces by Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso and Marc Chagall to the block at just the right time —rich people are more flush with cash than usual.
“Over the last four years, the stock market has gone up and disposable income has gone up, but art has not gone up,” one hedge funder turned collector noted to The Post.
“We have more billionaires than we have great works of art. It only takes two people and one work of art for a big check to get written.”
Nahmad agrees, saying: “The stock market reached record highs and interest rates began to go down. The rich are richer than ever.
“The only thing missing over the last two years was confidence. With these stellar auction results, people are jumping back in. People have the money and the confidence.”
What’s not been commanding the big bucks, however, is 21st century art.
The garish Art Basel Miami screamed through Florida last week. In recent years it’s become better known as a party destination, celebrity showcase and a venue for stunt-like conceptualism than its sales.
More attention was paid to Rihanna and her partner A$AP Rocky swaggering into galleries, Diplo DJing at a strip club and model Karlie Kloss swanning around a zoo-themed bash held by Cartier than most of the art for sale.
The art headlines were universally grabbed by Beeple, with “Regular Animals,” a pen of six robotic dogs with human heads. The heads resembled billionaire tech titans Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos as well as artists Andy Warhol, Picasso and – of course – Beeple, aka Mike Winkelmann, himself.
The robo-dogs periodically went into “poop mode,” which would cause them to crouch down and eject images taken by a front-facing camera as polaroids, some of which were NFT digital artworks. The dogs were priced at $100,000 each and sold out immediately.
However, the biggest sale of the fair was a Muhammad Ali portrait by Andy Warhol for $18 million, a 1977 artwork. After the piece was done, Warhol posed for a photo that showed him cheekily touching up the champ’s face on his canvas. Then Ali signed the back of the picture.
“Top collectors want the best of everything,” enthused Levy Gorvy Dyan, who sold it. “We had the painting in our booth … the best of Warhol, and an image that captures the spirit of the moment.”
Other large sales at Art Basel Miami included a 1967 Alice Neel painting for $3.3 million, two Josef Albers paintings for $2.5 million and Louise Bourgeois’s “Persistent Antagonism,” made between 1946 and 1948, for $3.2 million.
The lone 21st century outlier was a 2016 untitled abstract from Gerhard Richter which commanded $5.5 million. And he’s hardly a newcomer, having been born in 1932 and active since the 1950s.
Asked why art from the last quarter century isn’t selling, one dealer says it’s all about practicality.
“The contemporary art market is so much of the moment and so focused on the hot thing,” Robert Simon, the Manhattan-based dealer, told The Post. “If you look at the work of a 20-something artist as opposed to a 500-year-old artist whose paintings have stood the test of time, the traditional artist will not have so much volatility.”
Nahmad concurs: “A lot of the highly speculative contemporary art went down so much that people are returning to classic blue-chip art. They got burned, and there is now a return.”
The burn he’s most likely referring to is the collapse of the NFT market during the pandemic. NFTs — short for Non-Fungible Tokens — were supposed to be the future of art, digital works with the owner’s identify recorded on a blockchain to certify authenticity. They were initially sold as a new type of investment asset and around $250 million poured into them between 2018 and 2021, prompting huge sales and auctions.
However, just as quickly as they had risen, by 2022 the Wall Street Journal reported the market had dipped and daily sales dropped by 92%.
Another report in September 2023 from crypto gambling website dappGambl claimed that by then 95% of NFTs had fallen to zero value in dollar terms.
Still, collectors who flew from far corners of the globe to Miami for Basel said they were seeing great success, even if not seven figure sales. “I’m finding that there’s fabulous energy,” Christine Berry, co-founder of Berry Campbell Gallery in Manhattan, gushed to The Post, saying she had already sold nine paintings before the event had officially kicked off.
And the return to classic styles is rooted in more than mere money.
“In a robot world that seems increasingly impersonal, handmade objects and the spirituality that goes into them will be more appreciated than ever,” wagered the ex-hedge funder. “I think people are coming back and saying, ‘I have all this money, and I think my house will look better with art in it. I think my life will be better with art in it.’ ”
Underlining that point, a 15th century medieval triptych, “The Five Miracles of Christ” – by an artist who remains unidentified – recently went for a cool $7.6 million.
However, all hope for contemporary works isn’t lost.
Miami Basel’s high-water mark came in 2019 with “Comedian” by Maurizio Cattelan, more commonly known as “the banana duct-taped to the wall.”
The purposefully disposable and provocative artwork prompted outrage and infamy, exactly as it was supposed to, as it was designed to be a tongue-in-cheek comment on art, consumerism, how we assign value and where the line sits been artwork and stunt.
It was sold in an edition of three at $120,000 each. However, when auctioned at Sotheby’s last year, with text saying it belongs to a “rare league of artworks that need no introduction,” one example commanded $6 million.
So, come 2050, somebody may well become the proud owner of an NFT pooping Mark Zuckerdog for a nifty $50 million.