Art finance

A GROUND-BREAKING study into the likely effects of a new levy on art shows it could seriously damage the UK market and cost jobs.

TAJAN (20.93% buyer’s premium) started the year with guns blazing on January 17 and a sale dominated by 19th century weaponry.

Buoyed by rising stockmarkets and the continuing strength of the euro against the pound, European private collectors were buying in force at Sotheby’s and Christie’s February round of Impressionist, Modern and Contemporary art sales in London.

More Nelson fever to report. The exterior to this rounded rectangular George III silver vinaigrette by Birmingham smith Matthew Linwood is really very plain but open it up and it reveals a gilt hinged grille embossed with a ship portrait inscribed Victory and flanked by the word Trafalgar and the date Oct 21 1805.

With standard prices of antique furniture failing to keep pace with the property market (reported on the front page of last week’s Antiques Trade Gazette), even the most optimistic market observer could be forgiven for doubting the commercial potential of a mahogany hybrid offered at Bonhams Knightsbridge (19.5/10% buyer’s premium) on January 17.

If one wanted to view in miniature the issues experienced by the antiques trade as a whole, one could do worse than to look to the golfiana market.

After five years of hosting the British Antiques & Collectables Awards, the chairman and board of BACA have cancelled the event for 2005. Issues of funding have led to the decision.

For the second year running, Christie’s posted the highest auction total in Paris, with sales of €86.4m (£61.7m), up five per cent on last year.

ATG have an update on the round-up of provincial sale totals for 2004 published in issue 1672, January 15.

What makes a painting totally uncommercial one year and a sure-fire seller the next?Clearly, if there was a general principal of financial success to be learned in the art market there would be rather more dealers appearing in the media’s annual rich lists than there are now.

British medals are realising ever higher prices and it seems that buyers almost invariably hail from these sceptred isles.

Despite a year that saw no recovery in prices for brown furniture and problematic levels of demand for ‘bread and butter’ pictures and table silver, several of the UK’s top provincial auctioneers enjoyed record turnover figures in 2004.

Arts Council England have launched Own Art, a new national interest-free loan scheme to encourage people to buy art.

WITHERS and Devonshires Solicitors, law firms who specialise in art market issues, are sponsoring two seminars: one on art loans and the risks involved, the other on art and the police.

LAPADA have introduced an interest-free credit scheme to the portfolio of benefits on offer to members.

FINANCIAL information giants Bloomberg are to start providing an art market index on their 180,000 global terminals. Stockbrokers, traders, fund managers and investors from across the world will be able to access the Gabrius Art Market Indices in an attempt to provide a new information benchmark for the sector and to make the tools for analysing the art market more widely available to the financial sector.

A BIG cut in extraordinary costs for the third quarter of 2003 has boosted Sotheby’s latest results – as a result net losses have fallen by more than a third on the same period last year. The significant reductions in employee retention costs and antitrust-related special charges mean that losses for the quarter this year were down to $27.4m, compared to $43m for the third quarter of 2002.

Italian Sales: FOR the first time in 10 years, neither Christie’s nor Sotheby’s held an October sale of German and Austrian art. The German economy is currently in far too fragile a state to support a major sale of Expressionist material in London and theme-minded Contemporary and Modern specialists concentrated their attention instead on October’s annual round of 20th Century Italian Art sales.

THE growing strength of the Modern British market has had plenty of publicity over the last couple of years, but strong demand for Post-War painting is hardly news to the Scottish and Irish collectors who have been faithfully backing the “Modern Celtic” market for decades.

The lacklustre results posted at Sotheby’s (20/10% buyer’s premium) summer garden statuary sale were not bettered in early autumn, the September 23 catalogue seeing only 365 of the 666 lots sold.