CONTEMPORARY MASTERS : DAMIEN HIRST SNUBBED

The market for Contemporary art, the most speculative segment of the art market (+108% since 2003), is taking full speed the aftermath of the current financial turmoil.

Wall St. troubles are spreading over Fifth Avenue. The results of the November sales in New York organised by Sotheby’s and Christie’s are a slap in the face of the auctioneers.

Only 66% of the lots offered during the two prestigious evening sales found buyers and the global sales reached $204 million vs. a pessimistic prevision of $ 429 million.

We are far from the heights reached in November 2007 that now looks like the market's peak. At the same evening sales in 2007, only 9% of the lots remained unsold and the total revenue amounted to $ 399 million, i.e. 20% above the combined low estimates. As at 15 November 2008, the prices of contemporary and post-war art have contracted by 36% compared with December 2007, returning in a few months, to their November 2006 level.

A Self-portrait by Francis Bacon, a Concetto Spaziale Festa sul Canal Grande by Lucio Fontana (picture above at left), a sculpture and a painting by Roy Lichtenstein, a nude by Lucian Freud and an oil painting by Brice Marden are among the lots that the bidders left in the hands of the auctioneers. Even more worrying, 10 of the 13 works by Damien Hirst offered last week were also bought in or is it ? I would rather consider the occurence as an evidence that the market came back to its senses. Vive la crise !

LUCIO FONTANA : CONCETTO SPAZIALE

Lucio Fontana (1899-1968) was born in Rosario in the Santa Fé region of Argentina. His Italian father, Luigi, who had lived in Argentina for ten years, was a sculptor, and his mother, Lucia Bottino, also of Italian origin, was a theatre actress.

After WW1, he returned to Argentina, and began working as a sculptor in his father's workshop in Rosario. He later opened his own studio in the same city. Between 1925 and 1927, he won several competitions. In early 1940 he settled in Buenos Aires and worked feverishly, winning numerous sculpture competitions.

On returning to Milan in April 1947, Fontana founded the Movimento spaziale (Spatial Movement) and, together with other artists and intellectuals, published the Primo Manifesto dello Spazialismo (First Manifesto of Spatialism). Spatialism combined ideas from the Dada movement, Tachism and Concrete art. He then achieved a series of master pieces and Manifestos that brought him international awards and notoriety. He died in Comabbio, Italy in 1968.

This picture, one of his several Concetti spaziali (1) is a waterpaint on canvas measuring 39 5/8 x 32in. (100.5 x 81.3cm.) and was executed in 1966. It fetched £1,161,250 ($2.3 million) in June 2008 on auction at Christie's London. In her portrait of Picasso published in 1938, Gertrude Stein wrote: “A creator is not in advance of his generation but he is the first of his contemporaries to be conscious of what is happening to his generation.” The sentence could have been written for Lucio Fontana.

(1) Since 1949, Fontana’s perforations in paper and canvases were created under the heading «Concetto Spaziale.» They translate the concepts of the first and second «Spazialismo» manifestos of 1947 and 1948 into an artistic practice.