The Rise of Victorian Paintings Pt. 2 – artmarketblog.com
The availability and affordability of top Victorian paintings during the first half of the 20th Century allowed a select few collectors to corner the market and put together amazing collections of major historical and cultural significance. A short resurgence of interest in the Victorian era during the 60’s, particularly in the work of the Pre-Raphaelites, saw even more of the few remaining top Victorian paintings go to private American and British collectors. With so many of the best that the Victorian era had to offer hidden away in the private collections of a few wealthy individuals, the market was left with an abundance of second and third rate works. Considering that a majority of the Victorian era’s top works of art were hidden for so long behind closed doors, it is no wonder that Victorian era paintings suffered such a poor reputation for so long.
With no financial or other incentive to sell works from their collection, most of the paintings snapped up during the first half of the 20th century, and the 60’s revival, remained in the hands of collectors and behind closed doors. Death, debt and disaster proved to be the saving graces for the market as a variety of unfortunate circumstances led to a number of the best private collections of Victorian paintings being released back onto the market after spending decades out of sight and out of mind. The auction houses love nothing more than a single owner collection that has not been exposed to the market for decades and, as these collections began to become available, spared no effort in making them seem as desirable as possible.
The first of the major collections of Victorian paintings to make an impact on the market was that of American millionaire Fred Koch who, in 1993, sold his major collection of Victorian paintings which consisted mainly of narrative work by artists such as Alma-Tadema, Tissot and Lord Leighton. Koch is thought to have made the decision to sell his collection after plans to open a museum in London were somewhat affected by a huge fire at a storage facility that housed most of the furnishings for the museum, as well as Koch’s collection of Bronzes, all of which were destroyed. The devastation of the fire is rumored to have been so disheartening for Koch that he lost his passion for Victorian paintings. Koch began by selling some of his collection in Britain through Sotheby’s and achieved some success, particularly with a 7ft painting of the Emperor Heliogabalus drowning his courtiers in rose petals by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema which sold for 1,651,500 pounds. Also achieving a high price was a painting by Sir Frank Dicksee of a a seventh-century Persian heroine reclining on cushions with a vase of lilies by her side which sold for 793,500 pounds. It was, however, in New York that works from Koch’s collection received the best reception with Christie’s selling Tissot’s “L’Orphine” for a record US$2,970,000. A few months later further works from Koch’s collection were entrusted to Sotheby’s New York who sold Alma-Tadema’s “Baths of Carcalla” for a record US$2,532,500.
To be continued……………..
**Nicholas Forrest is an art market analyst, art critic and journalist based in Sydney, Australia. He is the founder of http://www.artmarketblog.com, writes the art column for the magazine Antiques and Collectibles for Pleasure and Profit and contributes to many other publications
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German artist Sigmar Polke is undoubtedly one of the most important and influential artists of the post-war generation. Polke is often grouped with other important German artists such as Keifer, Penck, Richter and Immendorf all of whom were part of the Neo-Expressionist movement. The Neo-Expressionist movement developed in the late 70’s as a reaction to the minimalist and conceptual art that had been a dominant force in the art world during the 70’s. The Guggenheim website defines Neo-Expressionism as: “Rejecting the restrictions against imagery and gestural treatment set by their Minimalist and Conceptual teachers and contemporaries, the Neo-Expressionists revived the formal elements of German Expressionism and Abstract Expressionism”
Let’s face it, art auctions are mainly about two things – money and excitement. Best suited to those buyers who don’t care what they buy as long as it is a potentially profitable bargain, art auctions are far more beneficial to the investor than to the collector. Auctions are not really suited to collectors at all because a collector usually looking for specific works which means that they don’t have the option of bidding on a different work or a work by another artist if the one they are after goes beyond their budget. Although a bargain may be picked up by a collector, the likelihood of the next work they want to purchase exceeding the estimate is just as likely. What this means is that if the collector is willing to pay what ever it takes to acquire a work for their collection, the bargains that they may have acquired at other auctions could effectively be canceled out. In the end it would probably have been far better for the collector to have purchased from a gallery where the prices are relatively stable and the pressure involved in making a purchase is far less.
There are lots of things that bother me about the way that art investment and the art market are portrayed. One of the things that bothers me quite a bit is the frequency of which the art market is referred to as being immune to economic or financial turmoil. To say that the art market is immune to the economy or financial turmoil is not entirely untrue depending on how you interpret the statement or the situation in which the statement is made, however, it is definitely not the whole truth and is often a misleading statement. The art market is a very unique market that reacts to certain events and factors in a way that does not correlate with the way most other investment markets would react. Because of this, the potential for people to incorrectly identify or mistake certain market movements, events or characteristics as evidence that the art market is totally immune to these events is quite high. This is not to say that there are not situations where the art market does display immunity but it is not usually to anywhere near the extent that is many people believe. There also seems to be many people who presume that because one particular artist, artwork, movement or regional art market appears immune to an economic downturn or financial crisis that the whole art market is immune.
Art Market Blog with Nicholas Forrest www.artmarketblog.com 
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