Christie’s Wednesday evening auction of Impressionist and Modern art will long be remembered by experienced dealers and collectors as the most surprising session they attended in a very long time.
The score, just shy of $156 million, was lower than the $170 million total achieved at Sotheby’s the previous day. But the quality of many of the works seen Wednesday varied from second-rate to downright appalling. That such modest offerings should have allowed the Christie’s team to turn the sale into a roaring success does not merely underline the bullishness of the market. It also points to a fundamental change in the hierarchy of aesthetic values. This modification was spectacularly illustrated by two world auction records set at Christie’s.
The first went to a petit maître of the second Impressionist wave, Maximilien Luce. Luce worked under the influence of Paul Seurat and Paul Signac, the founders of Divisionism, also known as Pointillism. The artist could have his inspired moments, but not when he rigidly applied the Pointillist doctrine and painstakingly juxtaposed colored dots with the tip of his brush. Unfortunately, this is precisely what he did when painting in 1900 his view of “Notre-Dame de Paris.”
The conventional composition gives Luce’s view of the cathedral the appearance of an outsize postcard in the Pointillist taste. The Christie’s estimate, $2 million to $3 million plus the sale charge, seemed wild to connoisseurs. The price it fetched at the end of a long bidding match anonymously fought over the telephone via Christie’s staff was wilder still. It rose to $4.22 million.
Within five minutes, a Fauve picture painted by Maurice de Vlaminck in 1905, “Paysage de banlieue” (Suburban landscape) set another world record at an astounding $22.48 million.
Fauve art with its contrasted colors and vibrant energy has been sought with ever-increasing enthusiasm for more than a decade and de Vlaminck undoubtedly produced some of its masterpieces. But “Paysage de banlieue” is not one of those. The composition is uncharacteristically confused, drowned in small disconnected details.
