The sales held by Christie’s during the evening on 19 November 2024—The Collection of Mica Ertegun and 20th Century Evening Sale—are everything you would expect from the evening sales of a top tier auction house: beautiful works from the likes of Picasso, Ed Ruscha, Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, René Magritte and so on, all currently on view at the Rockefeller Center in New York. Not far away at Sotheby’s New York, until recently, one could gaze upon the works from the Sydell Miller Collection which was auctioned off one evening earlier on 18 November 2024: one of Claude Monet’s Nymphéas, a beautiful 1921 painting by Kandinsky, and other such masterpieces by great names of modern and post-war art. In these times brimful of prominent evening sales in New York from the top 3 auction houses, it seems fitting to look back on how it all started: where did these prestigious events that we have become so accustomed to initially come from?
The Impressionist and Modern art market is often said to have been born on 15 October 1958, the day of the sale of the Jakob Goldschmidt collection at Sotheby's. Chaired by Peter Wilson, the brand-new chairman of Sotheby’s, the sale achieved a record result of £781,000—the equivalent of £22.8 million today—for 7 paintings sold in under 25 minutes. This ‘sale of the century’ also established Impressionism as the art market's most lucrative category of artworks at the time, to the detriment of Old Masters.
Jakob Goldschmidt (1882—1955) was a German banker who had fled the Nazi regime by emigrating to the United States. He was also a major collector of late 19th-century French art, which was not very popular in the 1920s and 1930s.
The sale of his collection closely followed another, which had also been held by Sotheby’s London one year prior: that of the William Weinberg collection. Organised in 1957 by Sotheby's brand-new Impressionist and Modern department—the paintings of which would thus have a category in their own right, separate from the Old Masters—, the Weinberg sale had been the first ever devoted to Impressionism. As for William Weinberg, just like Jakob Goldschmidt, he was also a banker of European origin (Dutch, in his case) and just as passionate about collecting French Impressionists and Post-impressionists.
Sotheby’s London had won over the consignments of both the Weinberg and Goldschmidt collections thanks to several key factors. Firstly, for the first of these two consignments, Peter Wilson had been more prompt than his competitors to answer the Weinbergs’ demand swiftly and with satisfactory conditions. Indeed, the Weinberg heirs had contacted the three biggest auction houses of the time: Parke-Bernet had answered with a much too high commission rate of 23.5%, and Christie’s had answered far too late with a reply by post. On the other hand, Peter Wilson had called the Weinbergs by phone on the same day Sotheby’s had received their request and had only asked for an 8% commission rate on behalf of the auction house. On top of that, the United Kingdom benefitted from advantageous tax exemptions, which gave the edge to London over New York and Paris for both consignments.
Following the death of Jakob Goldschmidt in 1955, his son Erwin had already entrusted Sotheby's with the initial sale of part of his father's art collection of Old Masters, nineteenth-century painters and Impressionists. This sale itself had brought good results. But, perhaps more importantly, Erwin was very impressed by the figures of the sale of the Weinberg collection that had taken place one year prior. Indeed, this collection had managed to garner £326,520 (about $8.4 million today). This number was very impressive at the time for such works of the late nineteenth century, which were still largely undervalued in the 1950s. Encouraged by all of this, Erwin Goldschmidt consigned a second group of seven Impressionist paintings to Sotheby’s London in 1958: three by Manet, two by Cézanne, one by Van Gogh and one by Renoir.
The sale of the Goldschmidt collection was completed by auctioneer Peter Wilson in 21 minutes. A self-portrait by Manet sold for the equivalent of £65,000 ($1.68 million in today’s dollar value). Manet's “Promenade (Madame Gamby)” fetched £89,000 ($2.3 million today). The third Manet lot, “Rue Mosnier aux drapeaux”, sold for 113,000 pounds ($3 million today), a record for a modern painting: the record had previously been held by a still life by Gauguin sold at the 1957 Biddle sale in Paris for 104 million old francs.
Van Gogh's work broke the previous record by selling for £132,000 ($3.4 million today). Cézanne's still life fetched the current equivalent of $2.33 million (£90,000 at the time). “Garçon au Gilet Rouge” by the same painter achieved a price of £220,000 ($5.7 million today). Three world records were thus broken, and the greatest price ever reached by an artwork at auction was surpassed two times during the same evening. Paul Mellon, who was behind the bid, donated “Garçon au gilet rouge” to the National Gallery in Washington D.C. in 1995. Finally, Renoir's “La Pensée” sold for £72,000. More than half a century after this sale, five of the seven paintings have reappeared at auction, fetching exceptional prices, such as Manet’s self-portrait, which sold for 33.2 million dollars in 2010.
Aside from the record results it achieved, the sale of the Goldschmidt collection that took place on 15 October 1958 was emblematic for several reasons: it was the first evening sale held since the 18th century, the first evening sale in the history of Sotheby's, and the first sale by invitation (with compulsory evening wear).
To popularise the sales, Peter Wilson transformed them into a glamorous event. Journalists were called in to photograph the celebrity guests (Anthony Quinn, William Somerset Maugham, Lady Churchill, Dame Margot Fonteyn, Kirk Douglas, who had played Vincent van Gogh two years earlier in Lust for Life), and television cameras were set up in each auction room to broadcast the auctions. Ahead of the auction, Peter Wilson had also launched a major marketing campaign, including a full color illustrated catalogue, press previews and articles in newspapers and magazines in 23 countries. The sale also established Sotheby's and London as the hubs of the global art market, previously dominated by Paris. Sotheby's had already set the pace when it opened an office in New York in 1955—the first auction house to do so—to better serve American collectors, who were beginning to account for a significant portion of demand.
Comments