If the recently wrapped fall art house auction season revealed any great trend, it’s that a Group of Seven painting, regardless of artistic merit, is no longer guaranteed to fetch jaw-dropping sales.
“I don’t want to point fingers, but one of our competitors featured a Lawren Harris Arctic sketch on their front cover catalogue and it failed to sell,” says Geoffrey Joyner, president of Joyner Canadian Fine Art and a veteran with 42 years of auction house experience. “We found not a great number of Group of Seven paintings on offer and those being offered weren’t of the best quality.”
This auction season, which concluded late last week, produced many impressive sales, including an Alex Colville painting that fetched $1.1-million at Heffel Fine Art Auction House and Wind Clouds, a painting by Group of Seven artist J.E.H. MacDonald, which sold for $589,000 last Tuesday at Sotheby’s. While there were paintings that sold for impressive figures — including Orchestra Chairs, an 1892 painting by Paul Peel, which was sold by Joyner for $413,000 — the way forward this May seems to be with works by post-war artists, and less with the Group of Seven.
“Within 10 years, the excitement we’re experiencing now when a living artist breaks that million-dollar threshold will not exactly be commonplace, but will not have that ‘wow’ factor,” says David Heffel, president of Heffel Fine Art, adding that not only is the Harris painting on his company’s catalogue already “virtually sold,” but that Heffel also holds all 10 of the largest sales in Canadian art history. “The future of our market is maturing post-war contemporary artists. It’s a trend based on attrition and matches what we’ve seen in the U.S.”
Despite the relative health of the Canadian dollar, leading auction houses are seeing growth in foreign investments. Thanks to the Internet, live feeds of local auctions attract buyers in England, the United States and, especially, Hong Kong. David Silcox is the president of Sotheby’s Canada and while he was unable to sell Ontario Village, a 1923 painting by Group of Seven member Arthur Lismer, his company sold just under $5-million in art. He says that 40% of the auction consisted of works by post-war artists.
“One exceptional price is a fluke, two is a coincidence, three is a trend and four is a new definition of the market,” Silcox says. “I don’t know if this indicates a real shift in taste, but you could almost feel the change in the room when we switched over to post-war art.”
This season, there were 15 living artists represented at the Sotheby’s auction. Heffel featured the work of 10 living artists and Joyner Canadian Fine Art featured 35 at their auction.
“The major auction houses here waited 10 years beyond auction houses in the States to hold contemporary art auctions,” says Don Thompson, the Toronto-based author of The $12-Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art. To put the Canadian art scene in a global context, Thompson mentions that three auctions this month in New York sold $380-million worth of artwork — roughly the entire Canadian art market of the past eight years.
“There’s never been a contemporary Canadian artist who sells for anything close to what a contemporary artist sells for in Europe or the States,” Thompson says. “If Damien Hirst was Canadian, he wouldn’t be Damien Hirst.”
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