The lack of fine art and antiques on the market is forcing auctioneers andbuyers alike to diversify. And although many valuable items have left thiscountry, it's not a problem exclusive to Ireland
The Dublin auction house of Herman & Wilkinson held a sale of toys last week. Despite expectations that the event would probably attract little interest, a large crowd filled the room to overflowing on the night. And there was keen competition for the most covetable lots, with a model fun fair making €2,000.
Until quite recently, the notion of bidders competing for children's toys would have been almost inconceivable, but this is just one sign of the changes taking place among auction houses at the moment. The current edition of a magazine published by Christie's and sent to customers around the world, for example, lists not just the expected sales of old masters and antique furniture, but also events at which the lots will be cases of wine, photographs, vintage cars and items of maritime interest.
The relatively small scale of the Irish market means such diversity is less likely to be found here. Ian Whyte, who used to specialise in sales of stamps, coins and various ephemera, left that field a couple of years ago and now holds auctions of Irish art. The reason he had to change his area of expertise - lack of sufficient material to offer potential purchasers - is a global phenomenon causing serious problems for all auction houses.
In Whyte's case, he explains "the kind of collections that used to come up for sale just don't exist any more. It used to be possible to find buried in a house in the country something like a 20-volume collection of British Empire stamps, but that's all gone. The kind of collections you'd be offered now are very modern and a lot of them contain junk that hasn't appreciated in value."
Although warned for decades that their expansionist policies were likely to affect long-term survival adversely, auction houses have tended not to heed this advice. In Ireland, for much of the 20th century, these organisations benefited from a steady stream of large country house sales which netted them substantial profits. However, the combination of poverty and indifference among the indigenous population meant that the vast majority of high-quality items in these sales went abroad.
Today, country house auctions are almost non-existent here, aside from the occasional attic sale such as took place at Farnham, Co Cavan in January. And the amount of good stock remaining in Ireland is pitifully low; by encouraging the disposal of fine quality furniture out of the country, auctioneers here have now left themselves with little to offer in future. For at least the past 10 years, the best place to buy 18th- and 19th-century Irish furniture has been either Britain or the US, where so much of it went during the preceding decades.
Shortage of material for a decent sale is not a problem exclusive to Ireland. A similar dearth worldwide is likely to lead to fundamental changes in the auctioneering business. The difficulties are most apparent in traditional areas such as old master paintings. The amount of this work has always been finite and, during the 20th century, as more and more museums opened around the world, the number of paintings entering public collections grew correspondingly. The result has been fewer and fewer items of consequence turning up for sale even while auction houses have grown bigger, employing more staff, producing ever more lavish catalogues, finding fresh ways to entice both vendors and buyers onto their premises. Costs have risen as quantity of stock has declined.
The world's two largest auction houses, Sotheby's and Christie's, are operating on tight margins. Significantly, a fortnight ago, the French luxury goods group LVMH sold its controlling stake in Phillips, another long-established house of English origins. LVMH reportedly spent $115 million acquiring Phillips in November 1999, and then a similar sum again in an attempt to surpass Sotheby's and Christie's in the marketplace, all without success. Not that the other two houses have been without their high-profile troubles. Last summer, Alfred Taubman, the chairman of Sotheby's, was convicted in New York of collusion in price-fixing with rival firm Christie's; the companies had already been fined $512 million for their illegal activities.
The two houses' behaviour was essentially due to a need to increase income in a business where the volume of goods being offered for sale was steadily shrinking. Even the introduction of increased commission rates being charged to buyers and sellers alike did little to improve the poor state of their finances. Hence the necessary diversification from traditional goods, such as old master paintings and fine antique furniture, into all sorts of other items: from toys - offered over two days last week at Christie's in London - to second-hand clothing, albeit of the expensive couture variety.
Here in Ireland, similar problems are faced by auctioneers, even if their woes are not on the same scale as those of the global conglomerates. But one difficulty local businesses have had to face since the mid-1990s has been encroachment from Sotheby's and Christie's, both of which now hold annual Irish art sales every May - in their London offices. The cream of stock coming onto the market risks being siphoned out of the country for these high-profile events, leaving Irish auction houses with still less to offer in their own salerooms.
For potential vendors, Christie's and Sotheby's offer the possibility of higher prices being achieved at their auctions, and this explains why goods continue to leave the country, even if many of them subsequently return after being bought in London at sterling rates.
Meanwhile, back in Ireland, the problem of inequality between supply and demand remains unresolved. In relation to antique furniture, the amount of top quality work remains pitifully small, and it is not being supplemented by modern masters working here.
As for art, there are now many more Irish public galleries than there used to be, all of them with acquisitions budgets, however small, and all wanting to extend their collections, the contents of which are thereby removed from the market. Very little top quality Irish art from the first half of the 20th century is now available for sale, and what does come up tends to be outside the budget of most aspiring purchasers. Key names such as Jack B. Yeats, Walter Osborne, Roderick O'Conor, Sir William Orpen, Sir John Lavery, Paul Henry and, among living artists, Louis Le Brocquy, have effectively become unaffordable to all but the exceptionally wealthy. Formerly available at quite reasonable prices, work by the likes of William Leech, Percy French, Sean Keating and George Russell is also fast becoming inaccessibly expensive.
As a result, since the early 1990s, a secondary group of painters has risen in popularity and price, among them Harry Kernoff, Daniel O'Neill, Colin Middleton and William Conor. A painter such as Stella Steyn, who died 15 years ago and was all but forgotten, can suddenly be rediscovered and receive a lot of attention, as happened in her case last year.
Similarly, living artists who are given large, high-profile retrospective exhibitions - at the moment Patrick Scott in the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art and Charles Brady at the RHA Gallagher Gallery - can also expect the value of their work to increase when it next comes up for sale. The number of catalogues and monographs devoted to Irish art has also increased in response to greater public interest in and awareness of the subject. Last year, new price records at auction were set for at least 15 Irish artists, and already this year, at a sale conducted by Whyte's a fortnight ago, two more such records were achieved: €33,000 for Connemara Man by Maurice Wilks; and €19,000 for Jack Hanlon's Conkers.
FOR a new generation of collectors, new artists are constantly being discoveredand promoted. When John de Vere White started running art auctions in Dublin 15 years ago, there was little or no interest among buyers for work by their contemporaries; now, pictures by living artists turn up frequently at his events and attract excellent prices. De Vere White faces ever-increasing competition, not just from fresh entrants into the domestic art auction business, such as Ian Whyte, but also from the steadily growing number of dealers and commercial galleries throughout the country, all jostling for a share of the same, relatively small market.
Obviously, not all the artists currently being promoted through auctions and private sales are of equal merit; some will survive the tough test of posterity, others will fail to do so. It used to be that auctions were a good place in which to judge a work of art's authority, but of late the circumstances in which these events take place have totally changed. There are fewer and fewer first-rate older lots coming into the salesrooms, and their absence means a loss of context in which to judge contemporary work. More than ever, therefore, and not just where old toys are concerned, buyers should remember the maxim caveat emptor.
