Dwindling art supplies generate blindness – and erratic prices

Extreme rarity in the art market can have perverse effects, as was demonstrated this week at the Impressionist and Modern art sales held at Christie's and Sotheby's.

One consequence is that it reduces the possibilities of comparison, thus sapping the foundations of aesthetic assessment. As a result, gigantic prices are paid for works by famous artists that would not have induced auction house marketing teams to pour unrestrained praise over them a couple of decades ago.

Of the three most expensive works sold in Christie’s Tuesday evening session, only one, Monet’s close-up view of waterlilies floating on the pond of his garden at Giverny, painted in 1919, justified the excitement that it created, leading to a world auction record for the artist set at £40.92 million, or about $80.45 million.

“Le bassin avec nymphéas” is one of about 30 large-size views painted between 1903 and 1926, the year of the Impressionist master’s death. Leaving out some half-finished canvases, hardly any “Nymphéas” of this calibre remain in private hands – and none with Monet’s signature, which adorns Christie’s picture.

While highly elaborate (a rare feature), the composition seen this week is by no means the greatest of them all. But a famous provenance (the New York Havemeyer collection) and the lack of an alternative to anyone looking for a signed memento from Monet’s supreme achievement, ensured the triumph of the “Nymphéas,” courtesy of a private buyer bidding through a London-based company, Arts & Management International.

The second highest price, £13.48 million, went to a work that drew lyrical comments from Christie’s specialists, but hardly qualifies as one of the great masterpieces created by Degas while observing young ballet dancers. Drawn around 1880, the pastel shows two “petit rats,” as the teenage girls were called, training to do splits while holding on to a rail with one hand to keep their balance.

Eager as he was to catch movement, Degas often found it difficult to render it. The legs and arms are awkwardly wooden and the hesitant black outlines do not help. The price owes less to art than to the near-impossibility of acquiring one of the marvelous pastels featuring ballet dancers that Degas also drew, now all locked up in museums. Famous provenances and multiple reproductions in art books contributed to give the pastel an aura that helped its financial ascent.

The brilliant performance of Natalia Goncharova’s composition painted around 1912, which unexpectedly set a world auction record for the Russian artist at £5.52 million, is a more complex case. “Les fleurs,” as the picture suggestive of serrated leaves rather than flowers is called, is not Goncharova’s finest. Influenced by German Expressionism, it bears little resemblance to the “Rayist” paintings for which she is famous and stands apart within her œuvre. The enormous price presumably reflects the attraction experienced by the buyer and whoever underbid him/her.

If extreme scarcity makes it easier to exaggerate the merit of the remaining works by artists whose truly great pictures rarely come up at auction, it also leads to some real gems being overlooked. As art supplies shrink, so does connoisseurship – the most gifted connoisseurs are only as good as the sum total of what they have trained their eyes on.

At Christie’s, two of the most remarkable works aroused limited attention. Camille Pissarro’s view of a wood, “Lisière de bois” (The Edge of the Woods), done in 1878, ranks among the greatest landscapes dating from the painter’s early Impressionist phase. The impression of dense foliage swaying under the breeze and scintillating in the early summer sunshine is conveyed through vigorously applied touches of the brush heavily laden with paint. The impeccable composition and the color harmony are unsurpassed. Given the dearth of early Impressionist masterpieces, one might have expected a marvelous landscape by one of the founding fathers of the movement to go through the roof. Instead, it cost a reasonable £1.27 million.

That same evening, an even rarer picture narrowly missed failure. Bonnard’s “La rade” (The Harbor) painted in 1929 is one of those seascapes in which the water and the sky are handled like abstract tapestries. The ghostly silhouette of a barge in the foreground and some indistinct ships in the distance underline the immensity of nature while an invisible sun colors the orange and yellow cloud bands over the horizon. This understated masterpiece sold for £433,250 to a lone bidder battling against the reserve.

The surprisingly modest price reflects another consequence of extreme scarcity. Prices become unpredictable. In many cases, there is no recent precedent that might serve as a basis of evaluation. Christie’s best informed specialists would not have dared to predict the record £40.92 million realized by the Monet, doubling a record set two months earlier, any more than they could have expected the Bonnard to sell so poorly. Seen from a market angle, both pictures were isolated cases. Each one sold on perceived merit – evident regarding Monet, but barely noticed concerning the seascape by Bonnard, whose name does not resonate nearly as much with beginners.