Christie's to Lose Contemporary-Art Chief
08 December 2016 - 2:40AM
Dow Jones News
Christie's top contemporary-art executive is stepping down.
Brett Gorvy, the longtime chairman and international head of
Christie's postwar and contemporary art, said Wednesday he is
leaving the auction house to be a private art adviser.
Mr. Gorvy is a 23-year veteran at Christie's who sat on its
board and helped the house dominate the industry for the past
decade—a position he bolstered by mounting ever-bigger sales of
newer art with ballooning price tags to match. In a realm where
billionaire art sellers demand huge profits and wary bidders seek
safe bets and bargains, Mr. Gorvy excelled at playing the
reassuring conductor, using hushed tones to convince both groups
that he alone could accurately pinpoint the market value of a
Lucian Freud or an Andy Warhol.
Born in South Africa, Mr. Gorvy moved to London and studied
journalism before joining Christie's in 1993. Back then, the art
market was still recovering from a recent market crash and
contemporary art was deemed speculative compared to older mainstay
categories like old masters or impressionism. But as he climbed the
ranks, moving to New York in 2000 to become deputy chairman of
Christie's Americas, he started keeping a revolving list of
collectors who he said could afford to spend $50 million or more on
a single work of art—and he set out to persuade each one of them to
take a closer look at contemporary art, or pieces created after
1945.
At the outset, most of the collectors on his list were in their
70s and worked for major corporations, he said in an earlier
interview. As of last year, his list included 141 names, and most
in their 40s and 50s and many were self-made billionaires. At least
26 people on his list were new collectors from Asia.
Mr. Gorvy's knack for cultivating these collectors and helping
them push up values for living artists helped Christie's dominate
contemporary-art sales for the past decade—besting rivals Sotheby's
and Phillips. In 2004, one of his sales broke the $100 million
barrier for the first time. Last year, he helped organize a
mixed-category sale of older and newer art that totaled $706
million, the biggest auction to date.
In that 2015 sale, he fielded the nearly $180 million winning
bid for a Pablo Picasso, 1955's "Women of Algiers (Version O)." Two
years before that, he was on the phone with casino magnate Elaine
Wynn when she outbid several rivals to win a $142.4 million Francis
Bacon from 1969, "Three Studies of Lucian Freud."
Mr. Gorvy couldn't immediately be reached for comment.
His move is likely to cause a stir in the clubby art world, but
it follows a string of high-profile departures of auction
executives in the past year as the world's chief houses grapple
with a contracting art market. Values peaked in spring 2015 when
Mr. Gorvy fielded that nearly $180 million Picasso bid, but sales
and art values have fallen off gradually ever since. Dealers say
collectors eyeing broader economic uncertainties have grown wary,
preferring to hang onto their prized pieces rather than risk
putting them up at auction.
Last year, Christie's sales of contemporary art fell 20% to $2.2
billion, a surprising-at-the-time turnabout for a house that had
staked its reputation on its ability to woo new global collectors
to bid up works by living artists. During the first half of this
year, contemporary art sales at Christie's took another hit as its
$788 million in auction sales for the period represented a 45% drop
from the year before.
Corrections & Amplifications: Brett Gorvy joined Christie's
in 1993. An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated
1994. (December 7, 2016)
Write to Kelly Crow at kelly.crow@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
December 07, 2016 10:25 ET (15:25 GMT)
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