With a subtle but unmissable flourish, Jussi Pylkkänen flicks his wrist
fractionally upwards to signal that, unless someone offers him 24 million
quid, he is going to bring the entertainment to an end.
“Selling in the doorway at 23 million 500,” he announces, gesturing at the
mysterious figure standing at the threshold who has made his presence known
with the last bid. “Fair warning to the room at 23 five. Selling at 23
million, 500.” A brief pause as he looks around one last time. “All done.”
Bang! The gavel falls with a sharp rap on the Chippendale-designed rostrum.
“Sold, for 23 million, 500,000 pounds.”
With commission, the buyer has just spent a total of £26,340,500 on Francis
Bacon’s Triptych 1974-1977, the highest price paid for a
postwar work of art sold in Europe. The transaction has taken just 80
seconds. And that, according to Pylkkänen, who is the president of
Christie’s Europe and tonight’s auctioneer, was a sluggish pace. “Those
major lots, you’ve got to slow down. Two bidders on a picture like that,
you’ve got to be careful.”
The Bacon sale is the highlight of a record-breaking, but not entirely
successful, week in the British art market. More than £400 million of works
are for sale this month at the big auction houses in what is regarded as a
barometer of the confidence of wealthy collectors at a time of turbulence in
the financial markets. The Times followed Pylkkänen through what he
would later describe as “the most eventful and high-pressure three days of
the year”.
When I go to Christie’s headquarters in St James’s on Monday afternoon he is
sitting in his office, which is hung with art waiting to be sold, including
an Alfred Sisley landscape, watching clients gathering in the foyer for that
evening’s Impressionist and Modern Art sale. “I’m extremely nervous,” he
admits. “I’m thinking that in an hour and 40 minutes I’ll be on that
rostrum.”
It is a huge week for Christie’s, the highlight being Wednesday evening, when
they are selling the Francis Bacon triptych which they expect will break the
record for a Bacon and become the most expensive modern painting sold in
Europe. “So that should be fun. Might make 35, 40 million.” He bullishly
predicts that the sale will be “the highlight of the past ten years in the
art market. It’s as significant as when we sold the Van Gogh in ’87 [Sunflowers,
which sold for £25 million].
“Freud and Bacon, the two great British 20th-century artists, now come into
their own; as expensive as Rothko, Koons, the great American artists. A way
to go to get to Pollock level or top of the Warhol market, but they have
been elevated to the premier league of the art world.”
Last year at Sotheby’s in New York a Van Gogh failed to reach its reserve,
causing panic in the art world. On the day of a big sale like the one
tonight, such concerns haunt an auctioneer. “There’s always that feeling at
the back of my mind, like going into a finals exam.
“The market will decide tonight whether the estimates that we put on pieces
are appropriate, how high individuals want to go. It can can be the mood of
that person on that particular night. When you are spending five million,
ten million pounds, that’s a very serious amount. The client in the Middle
East or Russia who has a bad connection or who’s had a bad day may just
decide that now is not the moment.”
He says he is not worried that the credit crunch will deter buyers, because
those at the top end of the art market are usually in a position to weather
such storms, “and if you’re a collector you have only a lifetime in which to
collect. If you want to own a Bacon, or a Bacon triptych, you will look at
the painting and say: ‘I have to have this picture. I won’t get another
chance’.”
An Impressionist specialist, 44-year-old Pylkkänen is a Finn who was educated
in Britain. He has been at Christie’s for more than 20 years, and taking big
sales for a decade. One of the skills of the auctioneer is to maintain a
steady, brisk pace. “Poise is important. You can get rattled by people
splitting bids, people missing bids, or telephone bids making life
complicated. Often you are talking a foreign language, on the line to
someone on a ski slope.
“I’ve had bidders who were going into tunnels in Venezuela – they get cut off
and you have to wait a while, but if you can’t get them back the lot has
gone. You wait just long enough not to lose your audience.”
He aims to sell a lot a minute: “A great auctioneer will add 20 per cent to
the sale because he or she holds people’s interest.”
We descend through a warren of back rooms and passages for a sound-check in
the Great Room. Porters in white gloves carry a Lichtenstein, unwrapped and
ready to hang, through the foyer, where clients are beginning to gather. A
Russian man is arranging for all Christie’s wine catalogues to be sent to
his home in Moscow. Pretty young women in immaculate black suits clack
around in heels, clutching catalogues. These are the “Christie’s angels” who
will greet wealthy collectors, offer them drinks and canapés and show them
to their seats.
As porters bang in a couple of nails and hang Picasso’s Homme
Assis Au Fusil, expected to be the big sale of the night, there is a
growing buzz in the building. Experts pace up and down making calls to
clients. Pylkkänen stages a mock auction for the sound engineers, and racks
nerves by soliciting “bids” from the lone reporter present – me, an auction
novice.
He goes to study his auctioneer’s book, which holds details of each lot and
his scrawled notes of commissioned bids and the names of clients and their
representatives who have indicated that they will probably bid.
The sale is ticket-only, with two other rooms also packed with potential
bidders in front of auctioneers on standby to transmit their bids to the
Great Room. Staff dealing with telephone bidders are corralled on either
side of the rostrum. It is an intriguing crowd. Many are obviously dealers,
gabbling into phones with hands half-cupped over their mouths. There are
well-heeled couples, and lone men whose shabbiness belies the money they
must have at their disposal – their own or other people’s. To my right, in
row F, is a chap in combat trousers. He wears an unfashionable leather
jacket over a rollneck, and carries a battered rucksack. To my left is an
elegant young American blonde with her mother. They both note the price of
every lot in their catalogues, but show no interest in buying anything
today.
The bidding is slow at first, until a Caille-botte does surprisingly well.
Pylkkänen's style is gently to entreat his audience to bid: no pressure, but
you could be missing the picture of a lifetime. “I’ll take four-two if you
like . . . will you give me four five? I can see you’re hesitating. Are you
out, Sir? I’m sorry . . .” He leans towards the audience, staring fixedly at
one bidder while extending his arm in the direction of another, as if trying
to keep them locked in competition.
“Give me one more, Sir,” he gently cajoles. “It’s the lady’s bid against you.
All eyes are on you . . . nine hundred . . . is that the killer blow, or
will you give me a milion?” Beat. “One million!”
Quite a few lots are not sold because they fail to reach their reserve prices,
including works by Degas and Matisse. The big Picasso sells for a sum at the
lower end of its £5-7 million estimate. But another Picasso, Femme
au Chapeau, with an estimate of £2.5 to 3.5 million, attracts
enthusiastic bidding until it stalls at £4.2 million. “Give me 4.3 and it’s
yours,” he tells a bidder. Then, just as the hammer seems about to fall, a
new bidder – a man two rows in front of me, sitting with his wife – enters
the fray with a £4.3 million bid. The price then rises in £100,000
increments as the man takes on a telephone bidder, whispering to his wife at
each turn and nodding almost imperceptibly at Pylkkänen, whose gaze is fixed
on him like a laser beam.
The man appears to be out as the couple have a last whispered conversation and
the room waits. Then a nod and the picture is his for £5.7 million. His wife
biffs him playfully over the head with her catalogue. But he is clearly in
the mood for buying. He is the underbidder on another Picasso, then buys a
Mondrian for more than £2 million, and a sculpture by Julio Gonzalez.
The crowd thins out for the Surrealist part of the sale, and Pylkkänen comes
to sit in the audience. He admits that he hadn’t expected that Picasso to
make such a price.
It is not possible for somebody to sneeze and accidentally buy a
multimillion-pound work of art, he says. An experienced auctioneer is
looking for eye contact, for someone with a bidding paddle, and knows when a
bid is serious. But he has had to stop people from waving, and confusion can
arise. When someone seated just behind me is bidding, there is a terrifying
moment when I think the auctioneer is looking at me. Later, a woman becomes
similarly convinced that she is about to buy a painting for £350,000, and
shouts: “Not me! Not me!”
By the end of Monday evening Pylkkänen is “very happy” – the night’s £105
million total is second only to a Christie’s sale last year in the league
table of highest totals for an auction in Europe. American buyers stayed
away and, unusually, a quarter of the lots did not sell. But the overall
tally, and the fact that ten pictures sold for about £3 million or more, is
enough to convince him that the market is still “very strong”. He repairs to
Soho House with a group of colleagues to celebrate.
That second-highest sale placing lasts for only 24 hours. Then a Sotheby’s
sale, boosted by Russian buyers, takes £117 million.
The auction houses have long been rivals, although at Christie’s they like to
point out that Sotheby’s is a relative newcomer to art, having been
concerned primarily with selling books until the end of the 19th century.
The two houses were inextricably linked in a price-fixing scandal a few
years ago but Pylkkänen says that, with a new management team in charge,
that is all behind them.
It’s a glitzier crowd for the Postwar and Contemporary Art sale on Wednesday.
More fur, more facelifts, more Russians, a scattering of Chinese. Several
pictures fail to sell, prompting mutterings. A Damien Hirst butterflies
picture doesn’t reach its reserve; nor does a Warhol self-portrait. But US
interest helps a Jean-Michel Basquiat go for £6.5 million, the second
highest auction price for the artist. A Bridget Riley spot painting goes for
£1.4 million, a world auction record for the British artist.
The man who bought the Picasso on Monday is up to his old tricks, swooping in
just before the hammer to scoop an Yves Klein. Pylkkänen had already spotted
him in the crowd: “You get that sixth sense. You just feel the burning eyes
and take the bid.” When the bids are racing up he is flamboyant, as if
conducting an orchestra. When something is not selling he dispenses with it
brusquely in seconds.
The purchaser of the Bacon is an agent of a collector. The price does not beat
the previous Bacon record of $52.68 million (£27 million) set in New York
last year, and is nowhere near the £40 million that Pylkkänen had mentioned
on Monday. He doesn’t come to the press conference. When I find him in his
office, he says that is because he didn’t want to steal the thunder of those
who had organised the sale. Although the Sunflowers sale was 20 years
ago, when £20 million was worth rather more than it is today, he says he is
“very proud” to have broken the record.
In fact he had known earlier in the day that the record for a Bacon was
unlikely to be broken: “I spoke to a small group of significant collectors.
They gave an indication of what sort of level they would go to.”
As for the 30 per cent of lots that didn’t sell, he admits now that the
economic situation may have played a part. Then he adds: “If you were honest
about our sales, they had weakness in the middle range. We have a very
knowledgeable audience.”
In the two evening sales led by Pylkkänen, Christie’s has sold £200 million of
art. He opens a bottle of champagne and we watch the last 15 minutes of the
England match. Game over, he drains his glass.
“The art market is full of myth. But when you come and see it, it’s
transparent. There’s no smoke and mirrors. You put up a decent picture, ask
‘How much do you want to pay for it?’ and off you go.”
Jussi’s top tips for buyers
1 Don’t think you have to be a millionaire.
We offer works in more than 80 collecting categories with prices starting at
£250. Christie’s South Kensington has an average price of £1,000 and offers
a huge range of furnishings and objects from the practical to the downright
quirky (furniture, picture, silver and ceramics sales are complemented by
posters, wine and fashion).
2 Research an object.
If you can, visit the presale exhibition and see it for yourself. Catalogues
are available a month before the sale. All views are open to the public
three or four days before the auction, and everybody is welcome to browse.
You can research any object online via www.christies.com
.
3 Never be afraid to ask questions.
Specialists are always on hand to answer anything – about the item, its
condition, its estimated price, the market in general, the auction process.
4 Set your limit.
When preparing for an auction, set your upper limit, as we have known people
to get a little carried away at the time – although it is rare that people
regret their purchases.
5 Most of all, buy with your heart.
More and more people look at art as an asset class. We don’t really encourage
buying for investment. You should buy art that you love and that you want to
live with.
