The month of April in New York is always a time of anticipation in the auction market. For the mighty sales that are usually scheduled to take place a few weeks later in May—encompassing Impressionist and Modern art as well as Post-War and Contemporary—are the landmarks of the entire auction season, a bellwether of success or failure.
I learned this years ago working at Sotheby’s, when the loss of a major Impressionist collection to Christie’s for the big sales in May was like a stab in the heart. A great chill swept through the corridors of 1334 York Avenue and drifted across the Atlantic to our colleagues on New Bond Street in London. One felt misery at losing anything to Christie’s.
In recent years the May sales have brought staggering sums for Sotheby’s and Christie’s, fueling their global growth and engendering perhaps a dangerous sense of hubris. One might have wondered if this success, this explosive growth, could last forever. In May 2019, for example, Christie’s achieved a sale total in excess of $1 billion in New York within a period of four days. The annual reports from the major houses have thus been filled in recent years with dizzying, surreal success stories one after the other.
So here we are in April 2020. By now there would be furious preparations underway, with auction catalogues going to press. But for the first time in memory there will be no May sales.
Not the big ones, at least, the ones that pay the bills. The auction houses have all hunkered down, announcing furloughs and cut-backs, working remotely and wondering what the future will bring. For now, they are biding their time with occasional online-only sales, many of which have been highly successful. In a small way these sales may augur a pent-up energy in the art world.
And perhaps when we are through this crisis all that pent-up energy will explode, with more record prices and renewed confidence in the art market worldwide. After all, many great collections and major estates with art may well be queueing up, waiting to make their appearance on the auction block.
In the meantime, here we are in April, still at home and uncertain about the future. But the art market will return at some point, and with it in due course will come those impressive sales in May. Until then, we will continue to feel boundless gratitude to all those medical workers, ambulance drivers and volunteers everywhere who are on the front lines.