Going... Going... Gone!

By Michael Demarest

The auction business is booming as more and more Americans catch art-collecting fever

Those wily old Romans started it all. They developed the form of sale that became the auction, and used it to sell everything from statues to tapestries to palaces and, finally, the relics of their republic. They knew well that audio (literally, an increasing) was where the action was. They should be around today.

Not since the first hammer dropped to the highest bidder have sales of valuables commanded such audiences, such publicity, such prices. While anything that is relatively rare is sure to fetch a pretty penny at auction these days, things of beauty and lasting worth--"objects of virtue" to the trade--are going for sums that would boggle the I of Claudius. Ars gratia auctionis. Throughout the U.S. and the rest of the West, once listless salesrooms thrum with auctiophiliacs in search of a piece of the past; the top firms hold several simultaneous sales a day six days a week. In 1979 Sotheby's and Christie's, the two London-based giants of the international fine arts auction business, together have netted $702 million worldwide. Nor does anyone expect recession to cool the fever. Some indicators:

> A huge painting of scarlet lips suspended over a landscape, the work of American-born Dadaist and Photographer Man Ray, sold Nov. 5 at Sotheby Parke Bernet in Manhattan for $750,000. It was by far the highest price ever paid at auction for a surrealist work.

> Earlier this month in Manhattan, the highest amount ever brought by a poster at auction --$26,000--went for Toulouse-Lautrec's color lithograph of Parisian Cabaret Singer Aristide Bruant.

> A study for the Rodin sculpture Burghers of Calais--not the final work--went for $255,237 in Monaco. The price set a record for any Rodin bronze.

> A Picasso drawing, Tete Classique, fetched $210,000 in Manhattan--another record.

> In five days of November, impressionist, modern and contemporary art sales at SPB netted nearly $21 million, close to the firm's entire 1967-68 turnover.

"The whole scene is slightly crazy," said Leslie Waddington, a leading London dealer who attended the sales--and observed that few of the offerings were of premier quality. "It's public insanity."

No sale in years has come closer to craziness than Sotheby Parke Bernet's Auction 4290 in Manhattan on Oct. 25. It took only three minutes and 45 seconds to gavel down Frederic Edwin Church's The Icebergs for $2.5 million. That was the third highest bid ever made for a painting at auction* and more than twice as much as any other American work of art has ever fetched (see ESSAY). In all, the 264 works by 146 American painters of the 19th and 20th centuries posted a record for a sale of U.S. art: $6,750,950. The Icebergs, a flamboyant canvas by one of America's best landscapists, was bought by Texas Oilman Lamar Hunt. Despite its size (9 ft. by 5 ft.), weight (more than 500 lbs. with frame) and fame, the painting had disappeared for more than a century until it was rediscovered last June in a penny-pinched English juvenile home.

Sotheby Parke Bernet's 4290 was a landmark sale: the prices realized at the auction will serve as reference points for years to come. Thus in the hierarchy of cash a relatively obscure artist by world standards ranks, for now at least, above any Dutch old master, any English painter, any French impressionist, any American abstract expressionist, any sculptor of any age.

Nor are high prices limited to paintings. Earlier this year auctioneers gaveled record prices for a French snuffbox ($150,000), a Roman glass bowl ($1.9 million), an American weather vane ($25,000), a Louis XV marquetry cabinet ($1.8 million), a Faberge hippopotamus cigarette lighter ($55,000), a book of photographs ($100,000), a 2nd century A.D Roman head ($94,000). Per auctionem ad astra.

Collectionitis is as pervasive as inflation, as euphoric as a drug high. Its grip reaches far beyond the roseate world of Rembrandts, Sevres porcelain and Georgian silver. A vast subculture of acquisition is feeding on scarce objects of every conceivable description. Britons are busily unearthing--and auctioneers as busily selling--such objects of dubious virtue as antique typewriters, gramophones and biscuit tins. Americans, with more catholic taste for trivia, have enshrined such unlovely objets trouves as old flyswatters, orange reamers, apple parers, Kraft cheese jars (a.k.a. "swanky swigs"), Mickey Mousiana, player pianos, Coke bottle tops, beer cans, Barbie dolls, barbed wire and tractor seats--to name only a smattering. Gypsy Rose Lee's mink G string sold for $1,500 to a London banker. In the mid-1920s, the firm of Louis Comfort Tiffany dumped carloads of the then unpopular art nouveau glassware that bears his stamp; a well-preserved rare Tiffany lamp today can be worth up to $150,000. By one estimate, the U.S. boasts 22 million collectors of one kind or another, mostly another. There are no junk stores any more, only antique shoppes.

And so the word "collectibles" has entered the language. To the serious accumulator, a collectible is any object of intrinsic value and aesthetic appeal. Forget the bottle tops. The field by definition includes such esoterica as crystal paperweights and samurai swords, but anything that can loosely be called art draws the richest audience and the fiercest competition for ownership. And the area is continually expanding as fads and fashions change.

American folk art, however humble its origin, is soaring in value as well-crafted objects like pewter pots, duck decoys, quilts and scrimshaw (erotic examples in particular) become ever scarcer. Photographs are commanding fine arts prices; an original print of Ansel Adams' Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico sold last week for a record $22,000. "We can see the day when a single photograph will fetch $100,000," says Philippe Garner, a Sotheby's photographic expert. Almost any object from the once scorned 19th century now seems as precious as Suez Canal Co. stock was in its heyday. Twenty years ago, a New York dealer reminisces, "people were giving away Victorian furniture for wood scrap." Today those otherwise indestructible pieces, long derided by the English as "chocolate" (they are Hershey brown), still cost less than glued-and-screwed contemporary furniture--but probably not for long: already a Victorian sleigh bed sells for as much as $30,000. Early American furniture, particularly colonial adaptations of Queen Anne, Chippendale and Hepplewhite, are worth far more than 18th century English pieces of the same style.

Victorian painting from both sides of the Atlantic has emerged triumphantly from post-Reginal depression. Long dismissed as sentimental kitsch, mighty canvases of noble beasts, Highland crags and soul-pierced virgins were selling for at most $1,000 in 1967; they go these days for up to $100,000. A sale of 19th century paintings at Christie's in Manhattan returned $1.9 million. "It was a lot of rubbish," snorted one Christie's man.

Over the past six months, such objects as ivory and jade pieces and antique silverware have all recorded huge price increases at auction. Among several categories of fine arts that experts believe to be underpriced but rapidly appreciating in value: 17th century old master drawings and prints; Victorian furniture, paintings, drawings, porcelain, silver and antiques of all kinds; Japanese pottery and porcelain, ivory and enamels; Italian baroque paintings and Renaissance statuary; American primitives; Egyptian, Greek and Roman antiquities. Also upward bound are American Indian artifacts, antique gold watches, rare manuscripts, books and autographs, Victorian and Edwardian jewelry, and art deco furniture. It seems that nothing that can be collected is being neglected. Well, almost nothing. Among the few items that have not appreciably gained in value in recent years: Jacobean furniture and portraits by lesser English artists of the 18th and 19th centuries.

What kind of people are spending for such things? And why? An immensely wealthy individual--a Getty, a Norton Simon, a Mellon--finds in great art what eluded Alexander of Macedon--a last world to conquer. It is a lust to which overachievers have been notoriously susceptible, from Catherine the Great, who built Leningrad's incomparable Hermitage ("I am not a nibbler but a glutton") to U.S. Industrialist Joseph Hirshhorn, the great benefactor of the Smithsonian ("I have a madman's rage for art"). To be sure, such stupendous collectors and donors still make record purchases. But it is not the proud possessors who crowd the salesrooms and find bonanzas in baubles.

The average buyer today is fairly young, probably in his 40s, and well-to-do. "Along with old money and society," says Atlanta Auctioneer David Ramos, "the young guy who scored in real estate is becoming an increasing part of our clientele. Also there are successful young lawyers who are investing in antiques for their homes and offices." The protests of purists notwithstanding, many people are buying tangibles as a green hedge against wilting paper of whatever kind, dollars or marks, stocks or bonds. As Sotheby's chairman, Peter Wilson, points out: "There's not a single person who believes that if you put $100 in an envelope and decide you want to give it to your son when he is 21, in 20 years' time that $100 will buy what it does today. Nobody in the world believes really in currency any more."

Many other factors have combined to pump up the proceeds. First-rate works of art are in short supply, and becoming ever more scarce, as the auction catalogues--if not the sales figures--sadly reflect. The prizes go mostly these days to citizens of nations that do not extract excessive taxes from the wealthy: Switzerland, France, West Germany, Japan and the Arab countries. Americans remain very much in the market, however, thanks in part to U.S. tax laws that permit a collector to deduct contributions from his taxable estate if he has willed his treasures to a museum. The museums of America, Western Europe and Japan have at their disposal millions of dollars for acquisitions. The biggest spenders: France's Pompidou Center, Washington's National Gallery, New York's Metropolitan, the Getty in Malibu, Calif.

Some of the canniest collectors of all are thieves, whose acquisitions from museums, galleries, churches and private homes are seldom recovered, despite intensive international police work. Interpol has an FBI-style Most Wanted list of stolen art works, some dating from 1938. Last week a priceless Tintoretto painting missing for nearly 30 years was recovered by the FBI in New York.

The price spiral is also sustained by a vastly increased public interest in art. More than 175 million Americans visited museums last year. Americans are better educated and more intrigued than ever with objects of lasting value. They share a hunger for possessions that have not been stamped out en masse for a homogenized society. They are beginning to emulate upper-crust Europeans, who have always invested disposable income in tangibles. Says Sotheby's Wilson: "We live in such difficult times that the art of the past is somehow reassuring. It can even be an alternative to religion." For many accumulators, it is.

Thus collecting valuable objects is no longer the preserve of the rich. At Sotheby's Los Angeles branch, which recorded a 1978-79 turnover of $13.7 million, 50% of all items on sale go for less than $300. Says Sotheby's Los Angeles president, Peter McCoy: "It makes sense for the average person to frequent our auctions. He'll be competing with the antique shop owner who'll sell a piece for more [probably 40% more] than he can buy it here." Caveat emptor.

There is an instant chic, a feeling of sophistication, in visiting auction rooms; decorated with pricey art and antique furniture, they resemble a cockney's dream of ducal halls. Sotheby's main salesroom in London, hung with chandeliers and often lined with valuable paintings, resembles a grand ballroom. Christie's, a few blocks away, has the slightly more venerable atmosphere of a London men's club. However, the principal attraction of an auction house before a sale is that it enables the viewer to make closer and longer observation of art works than he can possibly do elsewhere.

An important auction combines the tension of an operatic first night with the ambience of a celebrity party. A top auctioneer has the talents of a croupier, a fight promoter and a matinee idol. As SPB President John Marion, who has wielded the gavel for 18 years, said to TIME'S Georgia Harbison: "A good auctioneer is very much like a good lecturer. Everyone should understand what's going on and be sitting forward in his seat." He added: "Sometimes the atmosphere in the salesroom is absolutely crackling. The eyes of the whole world are on you at an impressionist sale. As much as $5 million may change hands in one evening. You just feel the weight of money in the room."

Clearly, the main problem for the auction houses is not a lack of public interest but the shortage of salable material. To lure valuables into the marketplace, they run ads in local papers urging people to rummage through their attics. Sotheby's also runs so-called Heirloom Discovery Days, on which for a small fee expert appraisers evaluate real and imagined treasures. A woman dropped in at its Los Angeles branch with a shoe box of attica that she had planned to give to the Salvation Army; the six Faberge silver-and-enamel pieces she unwrapped sold for $45,000.

The auction firms also assiduously cultivate known collectors in the hope that, alive or dead, they will some day assign their possessions to the market: auction executives are among the world's most diligent readers of obituary pages. William Doyle, the ebullient Boston-Irish owner of a seven-year-old Manhattan house, who expects to gross $15 million this fiscal year, flies in his own plane to reconnoiter rumored treasures. On a trip to Warrensburg, N.Y., he found a trunkful of letters autographed by five of the signers of the Declaration of Independence.

In a ferociously competitive business, similar tactics of search and cultivation are used by major auction houses across the U.S.: Robert W. Skinner Gallery in Bolton, Mass.; Adam A. Weschler & Son and C.G. Sloan & Co. in Washington, D.C.; Mortons in New Orleans; San Francisco's Butterfield & Butterfield; West Palm Beach's Trosby Auction Galleries. The so-called country auction where the city slicker might once snap up for a song a Revere salver or a federal highboy is as distant a memory as the nickel newspaper. Says Scudder Smith, editor of Antiques and Arts Weekly, "You look around some of these little country auctions and there are 25 well-known dealers there."

English auction firms are particularly renowned for their well-connected staffers' ability to sniff out what they delicately call "aristocratic sales of necessity" (translation: the duke needs cash). Even the sophisticated rich often have unexpected treasures on their premises. Before sitting down to lunch at their country estate with the Earl and Countess of Verulam, Christie's Oriental ceramics director, Sir John Figgess, asked his host "if there was a cloakroom [bathroom] handy." There were two cloakrooms, allowed Verulam: "You take this one and I'll take that one." In the John that Sir John took, he found a mid-14th century underglaze copper red-and-white wine jar. The Ming jar sold--at Christie's, naturally--for $204,250.

As audiences have changed, so have the mechanics of auctioneering. Twenty years ago, salesrooms were decorous, dusty--and dull. They were frequented mostly by dealers or agents for anonymous collectors. Save for the hobbyist or scholar who might attend a sale of arms and armor or rare folios, amateurs seldom bid for anything; mostly they were scared away. One intimidating aspect of auctions has been the seriocomic notion that by a cough or casual gesture the unwitting onlooker may become a high-rolling bidder. Only half in jest, Louis Marion, who headed the old Parke-Bernet firm and was the father of SPB's President John Marion, once cautioned: "Women who use then-- catalogues to salute late-coming friends do so at their peril." In practice, a buyer who wishes to remain anonymous prearranges his signals with the auctioneer. Thus a bid may be wigwagged by a nod, a wink, a patted handkerchief, a crooked finger, an arched eyebrow. Says one Manhattan auctioneer of a prominent patron: "When he turns his back on me with a cigar in his mouth and walks away, that means he's bidding."

It has been only in the past decade or so that the big sales have been covered by the press as Events; the sums paid for art used to be buried in newspapers along with ship arrivals. Now, with the tremendous increases in fine arts prices and the expansion of public interest, big auctions have become flash bulb and video-tape fiestas. To a large extent the transformation has been wrought by Sotheby's, the world's largest, canniest and most aggressive house. In the late '50s Sotheby's introduced such techniques as international telephone hookups, bidding by closed-circuit TV, the gala evening sale crammed with formally clad celebrities, assiduous ballyhoo and greatly increased sale schedules. More recently, Sotheby's pushed its mass-marketing strategy even further by signing an agreement with Tokyo's Seibu Department Stores Ltd., which brings the Western fine arts auction market into retail stores and enables Japanese buyers to place bids for, say, an over-the-counter Constable. When Wilson retires as Sotheby's chairman in February, he will be succeeded by his cousin, the Earl of Westmorland, who is an equally innovative businessman. "I am sure," says Westmorland, "the auction game is going to grow more and more popular."

The auction as a news and social spectacular came to full flower with Sotheby's acquisition of Manhattan's Parke-Bernet in 1964. Christie's, its more decorous rival, came to New York 13 years later and has been more cautious about expanding worldwide. (Sotheby's has 42 international bases, Christie's 29.) Not totally tongue in cheek, Christie's maintains that "Sotheby's is a businessman pretending to be a gentleman, while Christie's is a gentleman pretending to be a businessman."

To some critics, the auction houses' success is excessive. While no one blames them for dizzy prices--they are not their bidders' keepers--even dealers who are making wild profits as a result of the art boom evince a certain distaste for the whole process. London's Waddington points out that the auction world's Big Two, unlike most thriving corporations, do not plow back even part of their profits into research, grants for young artists or gifts to museums. Says he: "They are simply dealing in commodities." There is a gavel-size black cloud over the Big Two, however. Christie's, closely followed in London by Sotheby's, in 1975 tacked a 10% buyer's premium on all sales (in addition to the average 10% commission charged the seller). English dealers with American backing sued the two firms for collusion and restraint of trade. The case will not even come to trial for an other year; in the U.S., where the same surcharge has been levied, a dealer's suit may be played all over again.

A far more controversial move was made by Sotheby's last summer. The company announced that it had entered into an agreement with Citibank, the second largest banking organization in the U.S., to assist the bank's millionaire clients in acquiring artworks for investment. Though Sotheby's insists that the arrangement contains sufficient built-in checks and balances to dispel any suspicion of conflict of interest, many people in the art world are skeptical of any deal whereby an auction house may in effect end up supporting its own market. Says David Bathurst, Christie's New York president: "Using art as an investment scares the hell out of me. There's going to be a flood of money in and out, leaving a sound market devastated because of people who shouldn't have been there in the first place."

That may be an exaggeration. The wealthy and the powerful have invested in art from time immemorial, though it is true that the great collections have been amassed by acquisitors possessed of taste and love for the objects they buy. They have not generally been dis couraged by hard times. On the contrary, in recessions and depressions and inflations, the smart ones tend to liquidate stocks, bonds and real estate and thus have all the more cash to invest in other fields. Like art. Given the scar city of beautiful things and the insatiable demand for them, the sales will undoubtedly continue to take the bread and make the circuses. The Romans would love it. -- Michael Demarest

*The two highest: Velazquez's Portrait of Juan de Pareja, $5.5 million, in 1970; Titian's Death of Actaeon, $4 million, in 1971.

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