A global outlook, an understanding of buyer psychology, the ability to stay relevant and the retention of experienced specialists: these are the prerequisites of the modern auctioneer, according to Jussi Pylkkänen, the global president of Christie’s, reflecting on the firm’s 250-year anniversary, which falls this July.
“You have to forecast and grow bravely, otherwise you fall behind the curve,” he says, after revealing the auction house’s decision to open an exhibition space in Beijing in October.
For Pylkkänen, the “sands shifted” in 1987, when a Japanese buyer bought Van Gogh’s Vase with Fifteen Sunflowers for £24.5m and art became the ultimate trophy asset.
When James Christie opened his auction house in Pall Mall, London, in 1766, he “spoke to the audience from the rostrum, believing in the theatre of an auction that’s so important today”, Pylkkänen says.
An understanding of psychology is crucial, so Christie’s will continue its gimmicky but undeniably effective “curated sales” alongside “curated weeks” of multicategory auctions for the time-starved, international cross-collector. “Strictly defined period sales are a thing of the past,” Pylkkänen says.
The main challenges for Christie’s are generic. “Staying relevant, making sure the contemporary side of the business is in good order and reaching out to the younger audience of 35 and under… we used to send a catalogue to a few hundred people; now, a video on YouTube can be viewed by hundreds of thousands,” Pylkkänen says.
For all the novelty, and in the wake of several high-profile departures from the auction house’s long-time rival Sotheby’s, Pylkkänen stresses his commitment to retaining a “consistent team of specialists with more than 20 years’ experience. There’s no shortcut to knowledge and experience.”
A very British celebration Global rather than national tastes may dictate today, but Christie’s is launching its 250th anniversary celebrations in a very British way, with a loan exhibition called Defining British Art (17 June to 15 July) and an accompanying (curated) sale (30 June), back where it all began, in the St James’s district of London.
“The UK is at the heart of what we do,” says Orlando Rock, the firm’s UK chairman. The sale, which spans 400 years of British art, includes around 25 works by artists ranging from Joshua Reynolds to Lucian Freud that are “quintessentially of that artist and period” but also resonate with later work, Rock says.
It is not, he adds, a patriotic statement. “It’s not just indigenous art but about the fusion of ideas, the history of émigré artists, from Van Dyck and Holbein to Auerbach. British art has always been a very international taste.”
Hidden gems As with all such cross-period sales, specialists at Christie’s hope to encourage buyers to reconsider overshadowed artists or periods by tempting them with the gloss of more fashionable markets.
The companion exhibition mixes fine art with decorative art and furniture, all once sold through Christie’s and borrowed from UK private collections (logistically, overseas and institutional loans were not feasible).
Although Gainsborough’s 1778 portrait of James Christie (now in the Getty in Los Angeles) was impossible to bring in, Christie’s has a portrait of Henry VIII from the circle of Hans Holbein the Younger (sold at the firm in 1788), Landseer’s The Monarch of the Glen (1851), Rossetti’s Proserpine (1877) and L.S. Lowry’s Fun Fair at Daisy Nook (1953).
“I’d love to have an iconic Hirst from the late 1980s or early 1990s,” Rock says. “But we’d have to get the right one.”
When the sands shifted at Christie’s
1779 To Russia with love
James Christie negotiates the private sale of around 200 works from the enormous collection of Britain’s first prime minister, Robert Walpole, to Catherine the Great, the Empress of Russia, for £40,500.
1987
Modernity eclipses the Old Masters
Van Gogh’s Vase with Fifteen Sunflowers (1888) is sold to a Japanese insurance magnate for £24.5m (hammer price), tripling the record sum for a work of art sold at auction. It is the first time that a Modern work has held the world record.
1998
The first contemporary sale
Christie’s rents a warehouse in East London for the first dedicated contemporary art auction for works made in the past 30 years. Works sold included Felix Gonzales-Torres’s green sweets (1991) for £106,000 (with premium, est £55,000-£65,000).
