Sale-rooms
When the cows came home
Alistair McAlpine
Ihave for some time believed that the art and antiques trade is now finding similar trading conditions to those experienced in the 1960s. This belief was confirmed when I read a report of Sotheby's sale of Impres- sionist paintings that took place at the beginning of this month. I quote:
Throughout the sale de Pury succeeded in extracting the ultimate bid that got many hopeless works to vault over the reserve. These ranged from Impressionist works of the most uninspired kind — a confused 'Le Pre a Evangy' by Pissaro with cows in it (no one wants cows).. .
The statement 'no one wants cows' caught my eye. In the days of the boom lots of people wanted paintings of cows. Most- ly, I suppose, those who bought cottages in the country and wished to make some ges- ture towards the agricultural area where they spent their weekends while still con- tinuing to live their lives there much as if they lived in the city. Cow paintings were all part and parcel with the green wellies and parka jackets of those country week- ends. Whether or not paintings of cows sell has more to do with the growth in the num- ber of second homes than the art market. The growth in second homes, however, does have a lot to do with disposable wealth, which does greatly affect the art market, so the two will move in tandem.
In the 1960s there was a word or two of advice that aged dealers gave to those new in the game: 'Never buy paintings of cows, nuns or fish, moonlight scenes or sleeping women, dear boy.' The prejudice against paintings of nuns was shattered when Christie's sold a remarkable portrait of a nun by an Old Master — it made a record price. In any event, whether or not paint- ings of nuns sold well was never really an issue, for there were very few of them. Fish paintings were a different matter. Their fortunes spiralled with the boom in Wheel- er's fish restaurants. These were filled with fish paintings of various sorts and varying quality. When Wheeler's restaurants began opening all over Britain the prices of paint- ings filled with fish caught fire. So what of moonlight scenes, which for some reason, I do not know why, were in the 1960s very hard to sell, or were paint- ings of sleeping women thought at that time likely to be confused with dead women? Strangely, I cannot recall a paint- ing of a sleeping man. Perhaps in those days of sexual inequality men did not sleep — they worked while women wept and slept, who knows?
The boom in moonlight scenes and sleeping women, sleeping men if there are any, paintings of everything from clouds to kettles occurred in the late Seventies and carried on through the Eighties simply because the supply of paintings had become very short. This was not because discerning collectors had carefully chosen these works to add to their collections. No, the boom was caused by the vast number of hotels that were built around the world. Hugh quantities of completely awful paint- ings were bought and hung in these build- ings in order to give the often grotesque form of their architecture a human element that customers could relate to.
The fashion of hanging pictures in office buildings also spread like wildfire. Board- rooms were decorated with old pictures, foyers with new ones. There was a market for any piece of canvas with paint on it. Quality, provenance, subject no longer mattered; old pictures or new pictures, they sold as of right and they sold for ever increasing prices. Dealers with little knowl- edge borrowed money and spent that money in the sale-rooms. The sale-rooms themselves trained a host of new dealers. The market spiralled up and while all knew that a crash was a possibility, few were pre- pared to believe it likely.
All of this is why I take comfort from that phrase, 'no one wants cows'. The mar- ket has now returned to the days when a profit was made by the dealer using his eye and expertise to spot quality amongst a mass of dross. Back for the moment are the days when collectors choose with care and speculators ply their trade on the stock market.
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