Even in bad economy, buyers scream for art

The city's spring art auction season was red hot.

The frenzy began May 2 with a phone bidder at Sotheby's plunking down nearly $120 million for Edvard Munch's "The Scream," earning it the title of most expensive artwork ever sold at auction.

Then, Mark Rothko's "Orange, Red, Yellow" stole the record for any contemporary artwork at auction when it sold for nearly $87 million at Christie's on Tuesday.

But it didn't stop there. Artist records also were shattered at the two auction houses for works by Yves Klein, Jackson Pollock, Gerhard Richter, Alexander Calder, Roy Lichtenstein, Cy Twombly, Andy Warhol, Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei and others.

The art market remains one of the few flourishing during a difficult economic period. Among the reasons: an expanding global market that includes buyers from Asia, the Middle East and South America; a strong desire by the most knowledgeable collectors to own a top piece by the most recognized artists in the world; and the view that art is a sound investment.

"People feel very safe about buying art," said Nicolai Frahm, a partner with London-based Frahm Ltd. "You have a huge amount of new buyers coming to the market."

Christie's took in a record $616 million during the two-week-long auctions of impressionist, modern and contemporary art. Its evening contemporary art sale alone totaled $388.5 million, a record for any auction in that category.

Sotheby's sales total was nearly $704 million. Its Wednesday sale of Bacon, Lichtenstein, Warhol and other seminal works brought in $330.6 million.

Both auction houses offered works from famous collections -- Philadelphia philanthropist and art patron David Pincus at Christie's and New York financier Theodore Forstmann at Sotheby's -- and pieces that had been absent from the marketplace for decades.

"The reason for these record-breaking sales is, quite simply, the quality of the material," said Michael Frahm, a contemporary-art adviser and Nicolai Frahm's brother and partner. "The auction houses have managed to find rare pieces by the most renowned artists."

A silver silk-screen image of Elvis Presley by Warhol that fetched $37 million, Lichtenstein's comic book-inspired "Sleeping Girl" for $44.8 million, and 1 ton of handmade porcelain "Sunflower Seeds" by Weiwei, which brought $782,500.

The annual spring auction season was the strongest since the recession hit in 2008.

Experts said that midrange works of art also performed well, but it was artworks at the top end that accounted for the robust market. Tobias Meyer, Sotheby's worldwide head of contemporary art, said the top of the market performed well because of the global demand for masterpieces.

Patricia Berman, chair of the art department at Wellesley College and a director of the Edvard Munch Research Institute in Oslo, Norway, said, "This narrow sector of the art market is robust because of the record number of millionaires and billionaires worldwide, because of the uncertainty of other investment pathways, and because of the increasing glamour and cachet of the ownership of contemporary art among newer investors."