Withdrawn Picasso: Any Bailouts for the Art Market?

Picasso, "Arlequin," 1909, precipitously withdrawn from Sotheby's Impressionist/modern sale in New York

At least the Dow went up 889 points yesterday.

That may have softened the blow of yet another art-market confidence-killer, as chronicled in yesterday's NY Times by Carol Vogel: An important Cubist Picasso painting of a harlequin (above), which for 50 years had been owned by the Surrealist artist Enrico Donati, was suddenly withdrawn by Donati's estate from Sotheby's major Impressionist/modern sale, which is scheduled for next Monday evening in New York. Estimated to bring over $30 million, it had toured earlier this month to London and Moscow as one of the stars of the auction.

According to Vogel:

It had been rumored for weeks that the work would be taken off the market because of fears that art prices were heading the way of the world financial markets.

When I asked if the rumor was true, Sotheby's would only say:

The owner has decided to withdraw the painting for private reasons.

Lot 41 is nonetheless enshrined in the sale catalogue that has already been distributed. But all traces of the painting have been expunged from Sotheby's website. It's even been edited out from the middle of the auction house's promotional Private View video, where David Norman, co-chairman for Impressionist and modern art, haplessly called it "a work of tremendous art-historical importance and it's an incredible moment in the art market"...

...for all the wrong reasons, as it happens.

The only good news for Sotheby's in this misfortune is that Vogel's scoop didn't make it into the arts pages but instead got buried at the bottom of Page 26 in the local news section, below a larger story about "Tough Choices During Time of Transition for M.T.A. Director." This misplacement presumably happened because Carol missed the earlier deadline for the Arts section. Harder to understand is why her piece was also hidden in a small-type list of stories on the newspaper's online arts site. It was way down on that web page and not, as one would have expected, within its Art & Design section.

With the entire world, including emerging markets, now experiencing economic angst, it would seem that auction houses can no longer convincingly claim that art prices are insulated from economic shocks by the influx of new buyers from far-flung centers of wealth---Russia, China, the Middle East. Judging from Matthew Brown's story in Monday's Bloomberg, Christie's hasn't quite gotten that message yet.

If this month's major contemporary sales in London are any indicator, the forecast for autumn in New York is gloomy. (For more on London's fog, see Kelly Crow's Not a Pretty Picture at Auctions in the Wall Street Journal. For a somewhat more upbeat take, see Souren Melikian's Cool-Headed Buyers Are Now Running the Show in the International Herald Tribune, which followed his own less positive piece of the week before.)