The art of putting paintings under the hammer

The downturn should have seen the art market flooded as the cash-strapped sold up. So why does little of quality seem to be for sale aside from the Bank of Ireland collection?

IF THERE IS ONE thing the past year has taught us it is that outrage never lasts long. Before you know it Gubu – the grotesque, unprecedented, bizarre and unbelievable – becomes normal, and what was yesterday’s shocking headline becomes today’s reality. The sale of Bank of Ireland’s art collection doesn’t quite merit Gubu status, but it did generate considerable outrage. It also put art and auctions firmly in the spotlight. So what did Wednesday’s sale, which raised €1.588 million (including fees), reveal about the state of the Irish art market in particular and the world of auction houses in general?

Although you will never get anyone in the business to admit it publicly, not a great deal of top-quality work has come up for auction since the recession began, apart from the occasional stand-out piece, such as Paul Henry's The Bog Road, which sold at Adam's, the fine-art auctioneers and valuers, for €72,000 last month. This is surprising in a country where fortunes are being lost and assets realised, or so one is told.

The French have a saying: when times are tight, put your money on the walls. In other words art is an investment that will appreciate. This is true, but only if you invest wisely. So the lack of supply of particularly strong work implies either that the best collectors are still able to hang on to their artworks or that we didn’t collect very well in the first place. In the art world they call this buying with your ears – buying what people tell you to buy rather than making your own decisions. One of the problems with this approach is that artists are inconsistent.

Not every Louis le Brocquy piece is of equal quality or value. Nor are all the works of John Shinnors, Basil Blackshaw, Markey Robinson or any of the other auction stalwarts. Robinson is a strong case in point. After enjoying considerable success he rather churned out his paintings, to the degree that there are some pretty dreadful examples alongside occasional excellent ones.

Provenance comes into play when gauging quality. So, for example, if one buys an artwork that was part of a great collection it must be a great piece of art, the thinking goes. We use other people’s taste to aid our own. The Bank of Ireland provenance adds considerable value to the individual pieces in the collection.

Nevertheless, when a selection of the works were exhibited at the Glucksman Gallery in Cork, several people remarked that the estimates seemed low. When The Irish Timesasked David Britton, Adam's director, if he thought the estimates were particularly low, he said that the auction house's job was both to get the best return for the bank, and for the auction to be a success.

Britton lists Leenane Villageby Kitty Wilmer O'Brien, which made €5,700 against an estimate of €1,000 to €2,000, as notable in the sale. "I think there were records made for some of the lesser-known women artists," he adds. He cites James Humbert Craig's Getting Ready for the Herrings(which sold for €17,000, estimated €7,000 to €10,000) as an example of work reaching 2006 prices, 2006 being the year the art market peaked in Ireland.

The only work in the auction that failed to sell was Barrie Cooke's Big Forest Borneo. One of the reasons for this was the lack of corporate buyers at the sale. It is a triptych measuring more than three metres across, so few domestic spaces could accommodate it.

Patrick Murphy, the director of the Royal Hibernian Academy, says the Cooke is a major piece. “It is a nationally important work, and it is of museum quality,” he says.

The surprise is that it was not among the works selected for donation to the Irish Museum of Modern Art, but Murphy says it should be given to the Butler Gallery in Kilkenny for its permanent collection. “Cooke lived in Kilkenny for years,” says Murphy. “He was on the board of the Butler, and he would have been living there when he made the trip to Borneo. So it would make sense for the work to become part of its legacy.”

Another museum-quality piece that probably was undervalued was Tony O'Malley's Inscape, Murphy adds. "That was in his first show in 1982," he says. It sold for €15,000, its lower estimate. "It shows it's a good time to buy, if you can afford quality," says Murphy.

It is a buyer’s market, and one of the fears before the sale was that releasing the 2,000 works reputed to be in the bank’s collection at once would flood the market and drive prices down. About 145 pieces went under the hammer last Wednesday, and probably only about 400 works will be sold in all. Britton says a great deal of that work consists of prints and smaller pieces of little value. Adam’s is now deciding, in consultation with the bank, whether to hold another auction or to include lots, little by little, in its general Irish art sales.

In this way the market would not be flooded, although it is worth noting that the market for Irish art is rather small anyway. James O’Halloran, the managing director of Adam’s, says most Irish art is bought by Irish people and that the only contemporary artists to buck this trend are James Coleman and Sean Scully. There was a Coleman in the bank collection, and it was donated to Imma. There was no work by Scully.

Auction houses are notoriously tight-lipped about buyers. All Britton will reveal is that although telephone and online bidders were tuned in from as far afield as Singapore, the US and Saudi Arabia, the bidders were mainly Irish, though “there weren’t any household names” among them.

Online bidding is relatively new to Irish auctions. Britton says that although they have had the facility before, this is the first time they have done it “on a grand scale”.

That it is so difficult to find out who bought what reveals a wider lack of transparency about the auction process. It is often argued that where auctions have the edge over private galleries is that you know exactly what the work is selling for and to whom, whereas in private galleries sales can be mired in the world of waiting lists, discounts, deals and secrecy. In reality there are similar issues in the auction world.

Now that the dust is settling on the auction, some names will start to emerge as new owners show off their purchases. Who knows, maybe in 20 years’ time we will be outraged all over again when some of these newly augmented collections are broken up and start to be auctioned off.

Learn the lingo

• EstimateThe guide prices between which the auction house believes a work will sell.
• ReserveThe price below which a work will not be sold. During the boom this was not always below the low estimate.
• Buying inWhen an auction house bids on the work itself and ends up owning it. Not generally done in Ireland.
• CommissionPercentage of sale price paid by both vendor and purchaser to the auctioneer. Adam's waived the vendor's commission for Bank of Ireland.
• Catalogue termsThe different ways an artist's name appears in the catalogue. If the full name appears the auction house believes that artist to be the author of the work. If only the surname appears the house believes the work to be by one of the artist's followers, or from his or her school.
• ProvenanceThe place of origin.