Many Questions
“That’s one reason contemporary is so high and Old Masters is not -- there’s so many questions in Old Masters,” Naumann said.
A work attributed to Anthony Van Dyck, estimated at $100,000 to $150,000 at Sotheby’s, was displayed 14 years ago at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as a work by the British portraitist William Dobson. It was exhibited 50 years before that at the Royal Academy of Arts in London as a Van Dyck. In its catalog for this week’s sales, Sotheby’s described Dobson’s work, stating his “broader and drier handling of paint in the latter does not suggest his authorship for the present canvas.”
Old Masters works aren’t in fashion especially among hedge fund managers, dealers said.
“These hedge fund guys are not going to buy Old Master paintings, even if they hear prices are a fraction of contemporary art,” Feigen said. “How will it hang in some loft in lower Manhattan?”
The category is showing some stirring, however. In December in London, the Old Masters and British paintings sale at Sotheby’s totaled 54 million pounds ($80.9 million), above the high estimate of 44.9 million pounds. The sale included “Rome, From Mount Aventine,” an 1835 landscape of the Italian capital by J.M.W. Turner that fetched 30.3 million pounds, setting an auction record for the artist.
“We see buyers as mostly Americans or European,” Henry Zimet, president of Old Masters gallery French & Co. in New York, said about sales in the category. “We’ve had some contact with Russian and Chinese collectors, but no business.”