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Market View
Mary-Anne Martin

So what do we do with all the record prices recorded from 1992 to 1994? We think about them and recite to ourselves over and over, that art is not a commodity, that the art market is not the stock market, that paintings are purchased primarily for enjoyment and only incidentally as an investment. The closest analogy to the paintings market is the real estate market. You buy a house to live in. Sometimes, when you are ready to sell, it turns out also to have been a good investment. But there are no guarantees when you buy a house that the price can only go up, and this is certainly the case with paintings.

At the same time, certain works have risen a lot in the past few years, and this I think reflects a change in collecting habits as well as a shift in where the big buying is coming from. Armando Morales is the most dramatic example. Important examples of his work now command $300,000 to $400,000 and a good example of his work is now considered a "must" for a comprehensive collection of Latin American paintings. The collectors driving this market are largely from Central America, and their US base seems to be Miami. Their taste runs to the later, very colorful and richly detailed paintings, and those are the works that fetch the most at auction. This reverses the common trend in collecting, which usually places a higher premium on an artist’s earlier production. Perhaps Morales was a late bloomer, in market terms. There is no doubt that a dealer or auction house can get more right now for a late 80’s or 90’s painting than for a work of the early 70’s. This makes the work of the early 70’s a definite bargain in my view, since the artist was painting beautifully at that time and the works produced then seem less formulaic and more indifferent to collector preferences. In the final analysis, I think the 70’s will prove to be the period of the "important" Morales paintings.

Works by Rufino Tamayo have suddenly become a bargain. Not since the mid eighties have serious works by Tamayo been so inexpensive. The reason for the rise in Tamayo prices was threefold. First, there was a large retrospective of his work organized in Mexico in 1987, followed by a series of exhibitions around the world (Berlin, Moscow, Oslo, Madrid) honoring the artist for his 90th birthday. This prompted the usual fever of acquisition, as collectors realized the artist was very old, might die soon and "ooh, I forgot to buy a Tamayo!" Prices started climbing. Then Rufino Tamayo became very ill, had heart surgery and finally died in 1991. Prices rose some more during his illness and after his death. Finally, in 1992 the Mexican economy passed into part three of the "sexennial," marking the last two years of the president’s six year term of office. The stock market boomed and newly wealthy Mexicans began driving up auction prices as never before for some admittedly extraordinary Tamayos, like La máscara roja ($1,542,000) of 1940 and Children Playing with Fire of 1947, which brought $2,200,000. Both of these prices were interesting to me at the time since I remembered when they were purchased at Sotheby’s years ago for $50,000 and $88,000 respectively.

Then came the crisis of December 1994, with a tremendous devaluation of the Mexican peso, stocks falling and the economy of Mexico in a tailspin. Too many Mexicans started selling their Tamayos all at once. The result was a disaster, with only a handful of the approximately 25 Tamayo works up for sale in the November 1995 auctions at Sotheby’s and Christie’s finding buyers. In 1996 the auction houses became much more cautious about what they accepted for sale and at what price. This started the healing process. With only eight Tamayos on the auction market in May 1996, six managed to sell. I know the prices were low, because I bought a painting at auction for inventory, something I generally try to avoid, since the whole world knows what I paid. But how could I resist a fine 1941 oil by Tamayo at less than $300,000?

This brings us to the most recent sales, two years after the crash of 1994 and two years since the high point of the Tamayo market. A very interesting test case presented itself. The famous Tamayo, La máscara roja, purchased in 1973 for $50,000 and in 1993 for $1,542,000 came up again! Here was a painting that had made a record price for Tamayo twice in the past, now included with very little fanfare as lot 19 of the Sotheby’s Latin American sale of November 25, 1996. The estimate was conservative, $900,000 to $1,200,000, below the record purchase price of three years earlier. The painting was sold for $992,500 (including the buyer’s premium), or about 64% of what it brought a few years ago. Still, there were other bidders vying at this level and $992,500 is still almost twenty times the price for the same work in 1973.

What can we derive from all of this? Again the analogy to the real estate market seems to pertain. Over a long period the prices for important paintings in the Latin American field have risen dramatically. Yet those who buy at the top of the market cannot expect to sell quickly and make a profit. Three years is much too soon to reoffer an important work in a public auction and the seller of La máscara roja obviously knew that he should expect to take a loss.

The collectors who attended the last round of sales were there to buy but to buy wisely. There was genuine diversity in the crowd; many had traveled from Brazil and Argentina to bid at Christie’s for an important group of works from the Southern Cone, and there was excitement as new records were set for Berni and Di Cavalcanti. These are both artists whose reputations have been principally local rather than international. Seeing these high prices paid in an international setting will eventually have the effect of convincing collectors that these artists should be added to the "shopping list" of important Latin American artists that has expanded considerably in the past ten years. All of this is to the good. What sustains this market in critical times is the crossover that is developing among the new young collectors. Not influenced by the dictates of conventional art history books, many of which have until recently ignored this field altogether, these collectors are buying what appeals to them and rejecting the status US shopping list of the eighties (Fischl, Rothenberg, Borofsky et al.). They are much more interested in contemporary Latin American art and have contributed to the rise in the careers of such artists as Julio Galán, Luis Cruz Azaceta and Guillermo Kuitca. Blessed with an opportunity to travel frequently, these collectors are much less insular in their tastes than their parents’ generation. Where twenty years ago Cuban collectors bought Cuban art, Mexicans bought Mexican art, Argentineans bought art from Argentina, this has changed altogether. Certainly the auction houses, by introducing the idea of specialized sales of "Latin American" art, started the ball rolling. But it took many years and a number of important books and exhibitions before this idea of viewing art from Latin America horizontally across national lines rather than vertically by country really took root. It has come at a good time, breathing new life into a market that was struggling for definition. It will be revealing to see what develops next, as collectors make their preferences known. One thing is clear: the market looks very different in 1997 from the one I helped to launch in 1977.

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