£65m bid puts art back on the market

A sale of a Giacometti sculpture has set a new record – is the ‘big money’ on its way back to art?

BY CHANCE, Damien Hirst’s phenomenally successful two-day sale of his work at Sotheby’s in London in September 2008 seemed to mark the end of a boom in the international art market until, against expectations, Sotheby’s London Impressionist and Modern Art sale last Wednesday managed to grab the attention of the international art world.

In eight hectic minutes Alberto Giacometti's six-foot tall bronze, Walking Man Ifetched just over £65 million, well over three times its top estimate of £18 million. No-one was owning up to being the purchaser, but gossip quickly rounded on some of the usual suspects: Russian oligarchs like Roman Abramovich (a spokesman denied it) or Boris Ivanishvili, Microsoft's Paul Allen, or someone from the United Arab Emirates.

The Giacometti just about edged out the previous record-holder, Picasso's Boy with a Pipe, which was sold at Sotheby's in New York in 2004 for marginally less. It also meant Sotheby's scored a hat-trick because they also sold the now third-placed work, also a Picasso, a portrait of Dora Maar, in New York in 2006.

The record-breaking Giacometti has important symbolic value in a still uncertain market, but more importantly for Sotheby’s, and the art market in general, is that the evening indicated a significant improvement overall, with a good percentage of sales at very respectable prices. Records were also established for a Gustav Klimt landscape and a nude composition by the popular Belgian surrealist Rene Magritte, for example. Auctioneer Brian Coyle of Adams in Dublin has said of the auction business that, when the quality is there, the money comes to meet it.

CERTAINLY THE GIACOMETTI is a trophy artwork. It's a classic Modernist piece, on an unusually large scale for the artist. It was made in 1960 and cast the following year, as part of a body of work for a commission for Chase Manhattan Bank's Pine St plaza in New York. The planned installation was never completed, but several significant works emerged from the process. Walking Man Iexists in an edition of six casts, and four artist's proofs, none of which, reputedly, had come up for auction before.

What is slightly surprising is that not long ago Giacometti’s work seemed to have dated. He was in a sense the house artist of Existentialism. Born in Switzerland in 1901, he settled in Paris and befriended philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre before being forced to return home during the second World War. After the war, his utterly distinctive style of figuration captured and perhaps suited the stunned postwar psyche.

The sculpture had been in the collection of the Dresdner Bank Germany (since 1980) and its sale follows on a process of rationalisation following the merger of Dresdner with Commerzbank in May 2009.

Will this dramatic sales result encourage other banks to ease the effects of the credit crunch by selling off their collections? One hopes not. For one thing, the market would quickly become saturated. A real test of how strong it is comes with next week’s contemporary art sales in London by both Sotheby’s and Christie’s. Many people will be watching with interest.