Artmarket.com: Artprice Global Indices show the strength of Contemporary Art and Drawing in 2020: both segments adapted particularly well to rapid digitization – Canada NewsWire
thierry Ehrmann, President and Founder of Artmarket.com and its Artprice department: “the works that were resold at auction in 2020 generally fetched better prices. Two segments in particular stood out: works on paper (+55%) and Contemporary Art (+48%). However, you have to take into account the method used to calculate our indices and anticipate the fact that they tend to flatten naturally over time“.
Auctions and repeat sales
Auction sales correspond to the visible segment of the Art Market and it’s probably the segment that has best adapted to the consequences of the pandemic by accelerating its switch to an online modus operandi. Artprice’s 2020 of the Art Market Report will soon reveal all the details of this transformation (the publication of our free report is expected in March 2021).
Artprice’s Global Indices are calculated on the basis of a very specific pool of works: lots which have already been sold at public auction. This method of calculation (the repeat-sales method) is considered particularly robust, but it excludes all lots that appear in an auction sale for the first time.
Extraordinary resales
Among the highest value increases recorded in 2020, Artprice was particularly interested in Banksy’s the performance. His acrylic on canvas Weston Super Mare (1999) was acquired for $16,700 in 2006 at Sotheby’s in London and was resold for $978,000 in October 2020 at Bonhams in London. The gain corresponds to an annual return on investment of 34% over 14 years.
Inversely, a small canvas by Raqib Shaw – Untitled (2004) – was acquired for $91,000 in 2008 at Sotheby’s New York, but sold for just $8,750 in 2020 at Wright in Chicago.
Between its last two appearances at auction, Joan Mitchell’s diptych La Grande Vallée VII (1983) multiplied in value 44 times, from $330,000 in 1989 to $14.5 million in 2020. Joan Mitchell was in fact the most successful female artist at auction in 2020, but her prices didn’t just soar last year. Taking into account all of her works sold and resold at auction over the years, Artprice estimates that her prices rose 15% over the last twelve months. This increase is added to the over 2000% value accretion calculated by Artprice using the same method between 2000 and 2019 for all of Mitchell’s work.
Artmarket and its Artprice department was founded in 1997 by its CEO, thierry Ehrmann. Artmarket and its Artprice department is controlled by Groupe Serveur, created in 1987.
Artmarket is a global player in the Art Market with, among other structures, its Artprice department, world leader in the accumulation, management and exploitation of historical and current art market information in databanks containing over 30 million indices and auction results, covering more than 744,000 artists.
Artprice Images® allows unlimited access to the largest Art Market image bank in the world: no less than 180 million digital images of photographs or engraved reproductions of artworks from 1700 to the present day, commented by our art historians.
Artmarket with its Artprice department accumulates data on a permanent basis from 6300 Auction Houses and produces key Art Market information for the main press and media agencies (7,200 publications). Its 4.5 million ‘members log in’ users have access to ads posted by other members, a network that today represents the leading Global Standardized Marketplace® to buy and sell artworks at a fixed or bid price (auctions regulated by paragraphs 2 and 3 of Article L 321.3 of France’s Commercial Code).
Artmarket with its Artprice department, has been awarded the State label “Innovative Company” by the Public Investment Bank (BPI) (for the second time in November 2018 for a new period of 3 years) which is supporting the company in its project to consolidate its position as a global player in the market art.
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
