Banksy: $18mm. Richter: $35mm. – Auction Update

Hi ,

The May New York auction week closed last night with two market tests. Both passed with flying colors.

At Christie's, the late dealer Marian Goodman's private collection of Gerhard Richters came to market, the first real question of whether the German painter's market could absorb a sudden deluge of supply from the dealer who stewarded his career.

In all, Christie's 21st Century Evening Sale totaled $136.8mm with fees, a 42% increase over last May and the highest 21st century evening sale at Christie's New York in five years, with a 95% sell-through.

At Fair Warning's invite-only sale inside Tiffany & Co.'s Fifth Avenue flagship, Banksy's Girl With Balloon on Found Landscape (2012) sold for $18mm, the first significant test of his price levels since his identity was unmasked in March.

The headlines featuring artists from the Masterworks collection:

• Gerhard Richter, Kerze (Candle) (1982) — sold for $35.1mm at Christie's, the fourth-highest price the artist has ever achieved at auction.
• Gerhard Richter, Mohn (Poppy) — $20.1mm with fees, above Christie’s $18mm high estimate.
• Banksy, Girl With Balloon on Found Landscape — $18mm at Tiffany’s, now the artist's third-highest auction price.
• Donald Judd, untitled (1969) — $12.8mm, a new auction record for a Judd stack.
• Jean-Michel Basquiat, Asbestos (c. 1982) — $6.54mm with fees, above Christie’s $5mm high estimate.
• Peter Doig, Target — $7.15mm.
• Cecily Brown, Bedlam Vacation — $5.93mm.
• Keith Haring, Untitled (June 1st a Milano) — $4.96mm.
• Andy Warhol, The Last Supper — $4.59mm.
• Christopher Wool, Untitled — $3.25mm.

The week as a whole: at least $2.5 billion of art has changed hands—roughly double last May's totals.

However, the Banksy result deserves a second look. Loïc Gouzer, the former Christie's rainmaker who built Fair Warning, is the same dealer who first predicted Basquiat would cross $100mm when the artist's auction record stood at $12mm. (Basquiat hit $110.5M in 2017.) Basquiat is in a tier of his own, but he's now making a similar call on Banksy. As he told the Wall Street Journal:

"There's still a lot of mystery and magic about him, and he keeps finding ways to keep the conversation going."

This is the kind of market where the artists with the deepest institutional backing, the names already in the Met, MoMA, the Whitney, the Tate, are the ones repricing upward.

Dozens of those artists are in the Masterworks collection, and several were on the block last night.

If you'd like to talk through if art investing suits your portfolio, schedule your advisory call to get started.

Thanks,
The Masterworks Team