FINDING THE FUTURE IN FUTURISM | June 22nd 2008

Sotheby's

Sotheby's is betting that works from the Italian Futurist movement will be the new "must-haves" for billionaires. That is no small gamble, writes Fiammetta Rocco, the Books and Arts editor of The Economist ...

From ECONOMIST.COM*

The 400% rise in oil prices over the past five years has resulted in the world's biggest transfer of wealth for over a generation, creating a swathe of new billionaires in countries that stretch from Ukraine to the UAE.

Just as in the days when Lord Duveen, an energetic British dealer, was persuading wealthy Americans to buy Old Master paintings from impecunious European aristocrats, many of today's new rich are flaunting their wealth by buying art. Some want pretty pictures to decorate expensive new houses, while others harbour ambitions to fill museums with historic national art from their own countries or rapidly acquired work of international renown.

The diffusion of new riches around the globe has helped the top end of the art market. As financial woes beset Europe and America, the auction houses are being kept afloat by other countries' growth. Unlike the art-auction slump of the early 1990s, the current market is characterised by a welcome spreading of risk. Five years ago, Sotheby's reckons, its millionaire buyers came from 36 countries. In 2007 that number rose to 58.

The shift poses two challenges. The first is the old one of how to tap the new art-loving rich. Successful dealers and auction houses are those that can source the best works to feed the demand for quality and rarity. Recent sales have been marked by bidders prepared to go out on a limb to secure the paintings they want. "Buyers are totally ready to pay considerably in excess of previous record prices in order to secure exceptional pieces," says Philip Hook, the senior specialist in Sotheby's Impressionist and Modern Art department in Europe, who says he has rarely seen the market so enthusiastic.

The second challenge is more complex, and centres around a new proactive effort to create taste. "We have a responsibility in the market. We are engaged in a constant dialogue, not just with sellers but also with buyers. Each sale is carefully curated and choreographed."

During a buoyant market, houses can stick with identified trends and simply persuade holders of old stalwarts such as Picasso and the French Impressionists, for example, to part with their popular pictures. A far more complex and riskier challenge is trying to hand-pick the blue-chip names of the future.

Sotheby's appears to have had some success in creating a list of new "must-haves" for billionaires. A look at its recent major auctions of 20th-century paintings shows a number of artists who were fairly obscure just two years ago now command prices on par with the best-known artists of the period.

The German Expressionists and their followers are a good example. In the 1970s it was very difficult to sell German Expressionists, even in Germany. Today, the most colourful works are at the top of buyers' lists the world over. In February, Franz Marc's "Weidende Pferde III" ("Grazing Horses III") sold for a record £12.3m ($24.3m) to the head of Sotheby's Moscow office who was bidding on behalf of a Russian client (the painting was estimated at £8m). The same night, Alexej von Jawlensky's "Schokko mit Tellerhut" ("Schokko with Wide-Brimmed Hat") made £9.4m, nearly twice what it sold for in 2003.

But even these German Expressionists were following a well-trodden path. They were linked to top-selling artists, such as Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, from neighbouring Austria, and they had enjoyed considerable museum exposure in America and Britain. There are connections, too, with the bright colours of the Fauvists, who have enjoyed a huge surge in popularity recently.

Emboldened by this success, Sotheby's is now embarking on a far bigger and riskier, venture: that the new hot thing is Italian Futurism, a brilliant if short-lived movement that grew out of Cubism before the first world war and was crucial to the development of Modernism. Futurism epitomised the fascination with movement and speed. As the second Futurist manifesto of 1910 proclaimed: "Everything is in movement, everything rushes forward, everything is in constant change."

The movement's most famous painter was Gino Severini, who for a time painted dancers in bright colours in a style that mixed cubist patterns with the prisms of a child's kaleidoscope. One of his most famous paintings, "Danseuse aux Bords de la Mer" ("Dancer by the Sea"), a sequined figure with blocks of blue and grey, was the first Futurist painting bought by a noted collector, Lydia Winston Malbin. (Severini also gave Mrs Malbin some extra sequins in case the originals fell off). When the collection was disbanded in May 1990, "Danseuse aux Bords de la Mer" fetched $3.3m, a record that still stands.

Sotheby's hopes to top that next week, with another "Danseuse" (pictured above), for which it has posted an astonishing estimate of £7m-10m, the same price it has put on a Monet beach scene also in the sale. The Severini ticks many boxes: it is the most important Futurist work to come to the market for nearly 20 years; it is brilliantly coloured, in pinks, yellows and greens; and it has an impeccable provenance, having spent 40 years in the Guggenheim Museum in New York before being deaccessioned in the late 1980s in favour of another of Peggy Guggenheim's Severinis, now hanging in her former home in Venice.

The Malbin sale in 1990 was the first occasion that Severini and his fellow Italian Futurists, Giacomo Balla and Carlo Carrà, were seen in an international auction. Commenting at the time, Sotheby's noted that buying split down national lines "with Italians buying the works of Italian painters, German/Swiss buying the work of German/Swiss artists, and Spanish buying Spanish works." Of the four Severinis sold that day, two sold to private Italian collectors and the other two to European dealers, representing, it is believed, Italian clients.

The current record prices for German Expressionist works were reached when that barrier of national interest broke through to reveal a new and richer international audience. Sotheby's clearly hopes that Severini's importance as the lynchpin of Futurism will give him the same appeal. There is something hypnotic about the twirling dancer and the frills of her dress. Whether her outflung arms and exuberant bosom pass the test for conservative Middle Eastern buyers-such the al-Thani family from Qatar, who have become so prominent, winning both Damien Hirst's "Lullaby Spring" for £9.7m last year and the $72.8m Rockefeller Rothko-remains to be seen. Sotheby's, though, is confident. It has offered the Swiss vendor a substantial guarantee.

(*Fiammetta Rocco writes the Art.view column on economist.com, and is the author of "The Miraculous Fever-tree".)