How the British Art Market Went From Sublime to Ridiculous

New York Times

05-02-2025

An art dealer I know blames Ozempic for the recent slump in sales: Collectors haven't been hungry.
After reading 'Rogues and Scholars,' James Stourton's erudite and authoritative history of the London art market from World War II to our century, I'm inclined to agree. Stourton, for decades a former chairman at Sotheby's UK, makes clear that, although all buying is appetitive, auctions turn personal cravings into group binges, with global effects.
His Year Zero is 1958, when Sotheby's auctioned the German banker Jakob Goldschmidt's Impressionist paintings. While only seven works were offered, the black-tie crowd and TV cameras made it a spectacle. One Cézanne, sold for 220,000 pounds, set a new auction record. The night was a turning point, Stourton suggests, when auctions, formerly quiet industry affairs supplied mainly by country estates, became celebrity events. It also goaded a rivalry between Sotheby's and Christie's that endures today.
Both houses dated to the 18th century, but Christie's was older, more prestigious, known for its paintings. Sotheby's, initially specializing in books, was transformed under Peter Wilson, who became chairman in 1958. A debonair unmoneyed aristocrat and former MI6 operative, Wilson understood branding and embraced pure commercialism, even licensing the firm's name for cigarettes.
His rival, the Christie's chairman Peter Chance, was a former army officer, and stuffier. His firm fostered client loyalty by retaining staff, but suffered from 'lackluster expertise,' writes Stourton, until they started to recruit Cambridge art history graduates. Stourton reports the industry gossip: 'When somebody died, Peter Chance went to the funeral, and Peter Wilson went to the house.' Chance on Wilson: 'That man is a swine.' Wilson's motto? 'Leave nothing to Chance.'
With improvements in travel and technology, milestones of commerce were vaulted, and each appeared to cheapen a onetime gentleman's sport. Sotheby's 1964 acquisition of the New York firm Parke-Bernet broadcast a message of 'world domination.' To attract reluctant buyers, Wilson began publishing indexes in the London Times stock pages: Renoir up, say, 405 percent, Monet up 1,000. In 1975, Wilson and Chance seemingly conspired to invent the buyer's premium, using the reduced commissions to attract sellers, appalling dealers.
Such changes forced innovation among the London dealers, like the secretive Wildenstein's and Monty Bernard (who had been known to bribe train conductors to waylay rival dealers). A dense account of them canopies Stourton's tale, organized by pecking order and specialty (never have brown furniture and Victoriana read so page-turningly). For Robin Symes, the disgraced dealer of looted antiquities, 'hubris was followed by nemesis, and nobody rose higher or fell faster.'
In general, Stourton lets his quotes do the judging. They spray back at their speakers like birdshot in pheasant season. The dealer Richard Green's favorite painting is 'a sold one.' 'I collect money, not art,' a Marlborough founder said. 'The only decent artist is a dead artist,' quoth the dealer Julian Agnew. An impressive number of sources spoke to Stourton, with a candor only an insider of great principle could have earned. (A dramatis personae — or a map of Mayfair — wouldn't have hurt; at times the book is a surname soup.)
As prices and stakes climbed, questions of transparency, provenance, authenticity, expertise and exhibitions grew more serious. Several young dealers emerged as scrappy, even heroic connoisseurs. Living artists, notoriously risky investments, gained traction through brand-savvy galleries like Marlborough, which championed Francis Bacon and Henry Moore, and Kasmin, whose skylighted minimalist showroom was 'a machine for looking at pictures in.' Auctions began admitting living artists, too.
Wilson retired in 1980, not long after hiring Stourton. By then, Japanese buyers dominated these auctions. Their bubble was to pop with the 1990 invasion of Kuwait, just as the 1970s oil crisis sent Chinese ceramic sales, and some London dealers, to Hong Kong. In 1987 van Gogh set records with a 'Sunflowers' (Christie's) and 'Irises' (Sotheby's). 'Private sales' further supplanted the role of dealers, who crowed when the two houses got caught fixing commissions in 2000, and banded together to form the art fairs we know today.
The Young British Artists (Y.B.A.), Britain's last global movement, brought some American dealers calling in the 1990s, as London saw its 'gradual repositioning into second place behind New York.' But even there the duopoly has held tight, as evidenced by Sotheby's recent sale of a 35-cent banana for $6.2 million.
Though impressively aware of changing tastes, Stourton is not a visual writer, and at certain moments this can frustrate the reader. The achievement of Erica Brausen, the dealer who first sold Bacon to the Museum of Modern Art, pales without a description of that painter's deliberate repulsiveness. Of the globe-quaking Y.B.A. show in 1988, one work is described.
But Stourton's aloofness may be a practiced discretion. 'It would have been an appalling error of taste and intrusion into another man's privacy to go commenting on his possessions,' explains Stourton's onetime colleague Philip Hook in 'Breakfast at Sotheby's.' 'His pictures? His wine? What next, his wife?' (Also compare Stourton's Wilson with the nasty, deceitful version described in 'Rogues' Gallery' by Hook, who began at Christie's.)
Stourton's approach is nonetheless truthful. Stripped of the art lover's gaze, Stourton's taut chapters and business brain probably make a clearer portrait of a traffic that, on paper, can care ironically little for looks. 'A good art dealer,' Arthur Tooth is quoted as saying, 'is a man who can sell a picture he dislikes to a client who dislikes it.'
Outstanding in its own field, 'Rogues and Scholars' nears Anthony Bourdain's tell-all 'Kitchen Confidential,' whose real favor is not worship of food but an honesty about brawls and diarrhea. Perhaps by exempting beauty from his comic-epic of ploys and partners, Stourton creates an inconvenience for the casual reader but ultimately does a courtesy to the artists.