The 20th century

The outbreak of the Second World War greatly slowed the London art market and forced a number of the leading Jewish dealers in Paris to move their businesses to New York. Like the French under Napoleon, the Nazis were extremely acquisitive. In 1940 they created an organization called the ERR (Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg). Although the ERR was originally charged with the collection and suppression of “undesirable” political media, Hermann Göring almost immediately changed its mission to the seizure of private Jewish collections. It confiscated more than 200 French private collections and inflicted forced sales and confiscations on Jews throughout the Reich; tens of thousands of items—some estimates reach the hundreds of thousands—were thus seized. Göring made frequent trips to Paris to select the best works for quick sale or for transport to his own expansive personal collection. Legal actions have enabled Holocaust claimants to recover some of this property.

Ironically, the collections in German museums also suffered heavily as a result of Nazi policies. Adolf Hitler was determined to increase the representation of German art in public collections and to expunge from these collections all traces of “decadent” art. This caused the deaccessioning of major Italian Old Masters in favor of second-rate German art. There were also disastrous sales of Impressionist and Modernist paintings, many of which were auctioned by Galerie Fischer of Lucerne (Switzerland) for trifling sums.

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The New York art market benefited from the Jewish exodus from Europe during the Second World War, succeeding Paris as the most exciting center for modern and contemporary art. Two important refugee dealers were Pierre Rosenberg and Peggy Guggenheim. Art of this Century, Guggenheim’s short-lived gallery, launched the career of Jackson Pollock. The city also acted as a magnet for artists such as Piet Mondrian and Fernand Léger and for the Surrealists Salvador Dalí and Max Ernst.

The success of the New York contemporary art market depended upon a substantial number of collectors interested in new art and a complex triangular relationship between art dealers, critics such as Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg, and museums. The greatest of the postwar contemporary art dealers in New York was Leo Castelli. The most important museums were the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Guggenheim Museum, which validated the provenance of works of art and evaluated their significance. Auction houses played an increasingly important role as sellers of contemporary art after 1973, when the auction of 50 pieces from the Pop art collection of American taxicab magnate Robert Scull—some of which sold at prices 50 times greater than Scull had originally paid—garnered more than $2.2 million.

The European art market was slow to recover after the Second World War and remained largely dominated by dealers for some time. In 1956 Peter Wilson of Sotheby’s challenged the status quo by offering a guarantee of sale to the vendor of Nicolas Poussin’s Adoration of the Magi. Soon thereafter he employed advertising firm J. Walter Thompson to promote the 1957 auction of Wilhelm Weinberg’s collection of van Goghs and other items, which ultimately sold for nearly £327,000 (more than $900,000 at the time).

In what was perhaps his most masterful coup, Wilson recast auctions as glamorous celebrity-filled evening events. He initiated this approach in order to attract private buyers to the 1958 sale of Impressionist and Modernist paintings collected by Jakob Goldschmidt, a financier who had fled Germany in the early days of the Nazi regime and later settled in New York. Wilson’s strategy proved successful: the auction broke the sales records for the price of an individual painting and for a single event.

In 1964 Sotheby’s acquired Parke-Bernet, the largest American fine arts auction house, creating a bridgehead from which to launch its global expansion. During the rest of the 1960s and the ’70s, Sotheby’s grew from a London-based firm of auctioneers into an international firm with branches in the Americas, East Asia, Australia, and continental Europe. Wilson was quick to capitalize on new technology, introducing ever more innovations, such as telephone bidding and, at a charity auction in 1966, satellite links. Sales catalogs became more accessible, and the publication of presale estimates was introduced to encourage private buyers.

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Portrait of Juan de Pareja, oil on canvas by Diego Velázquez, 1650; in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Purchase, Fletcher and Rogers Funds, and Bequest of Miss Adelaide Milton de Groot (1876-1967), by exchange, supplemented by gifts from friends of the Musuem, 1971, accession no. 1971.86, www.metmuseum.org

Christie’s was slow to incorporate these innovations, although the firm’s superior contacts with the British aristocracy led to a number of milestone sales. Many of these were of Old Masters, as in the 1970 sale of Velázquez’s Juan de Pareja, the first painting to fetch more than £1 million. This was significantly the result of competition between American museums—most notably the Getty Museum near Los Angeles, the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., and the Metropolitan Museum in New York—and reflected the postwar importance of museums in art valuation.

Another significant feature of the changing auction market in the 1960s and ’70s was the diversification of collectibles. Victorian paintings and furniture enjoyed such a significant revival that Sotheby’s opened a secondary auction house in London, Sotheby’s Belgravia, specializing in Victoriana. In New York demand rose for Art Nouveau, Art Deco, and photography. Collecting was popularized by auctioneers’ road shows, television programs, and the Pop art movement, which made contemporary art seem more accessible.

The art market itself also became more accessible during this period. Beginning in 1968, the Art Sales Index brought auction prices into the public domain. Books such as Gerald Reitlinger’s Economics of Taste (1960), and later Robin Duthy’s The Successful Investor (1986), suggested that art prices were susceptible to financial analysis.

Following the Second World War, China, Japan, and Korea came to have a major impact on traditional art market centers such as London and New York. These countries also developed increasingly important local art markets.

For many years Hong Kong dominated the art market in East Asia. The city’s importance as an art center dates from 1949, when dealers from Guangzhou (Canton), Beijing, and Shanghai fled there following the proclamation of the People’s Republic of China and established the now-famous Hollywood Road as an antiques center. The former British crown colony was the principal conduit for business with the West for the remainder of the 20th century. Its primacy as a market center was subsequently challenged by increasing openness in mainland China and by the development of auction houses in cities such as Beijing that allowed buyers and their agents to deal more directly with sellers.

As noted below, Japanese buyers played a decisive role during the late 1980s in fueling the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist boom. However, within Japan itself a culture of discretion and protectionism inhibited the development of an international art market on Western lines except in partnership with existing Japanese organizations such as the department stores Mitsukoshi and Seibu.

Korea was somewhat slower to develop as an art market center, but during the 1990s South Korean collectors played an increasingly significant role in the East Asian art market. By the close of the 20th century, one of the most important private collectors of contemporary British art was the South Korean businessman C.I. Kim.