ABOVE: Detail from Canaletto’s Venice, the Grand Canal, Looking Northeast from Palazzo Balbi to the Rialto Bridge (circa 1730), the most expensive art purchase of 2005.

Picasso was again the most actively traded artist of the year, with 1,409 artworks trading hands internationally, according to Artprice, an art market analysis firm, Bloomberg reports today. Andy Warhol moved up, bumping Claude Monet from 2nd to 3rd place, and Canaletto, who ranked 239th last year in market churn, rocketed to 4th place because of the artist’s record-breaking sale of Venice, The Grand Canal (above) and the excitement that the sale generated for the 18th-century painter (it was the most expensive painting sold at auction last year, you may remember).

Other interesting trends of note: Dadaist art jumped in popularity and price, with Artprice’s Dada Index (yes, such a thing exists) rising 137 per cent. Futurist works closely followed in price, rising 93 per cent. Total fine art auction sales last year topped US$4.2 billion, up 15 per cent over 2004, and auction prices increased by 10 per cent.

And here’s the final list of the 10 most actively traded artists of 2005 (no drumroll necessary, 9 of them are dead and won’t care):

1. Pablo Picasso
2. Andy Warhol
3. Claude Monet
4. Canaletto
5. Mark Rothko
6. Marc Chagall
7. Willem de Kooning
8. Fernand Leger
9. Jean-Michel Basquiat
10. Lucian Freud

LINK: Bloomberg > Picasso, Warhol Top List of Actively Traded Art

ABOVE: Detail from Rembrandt’s The Apostle James the Major, for sale at the Maastricht art fair right now, one of the few Rembrandts to reach the market in the past decade.

There are two Rembrandts for sale at the current TEFAF Maastricht Art Fair (which runs through March 19), quite an oddity considering that there have been only about a dozen Rembrandts put on sale anywhere in the past decade, The Telegraph reports today. The Apostle James the Major (above) is on sale by New York-based Salander-O’Reilly with a price tag of upwards of €32 million, while Dutch dealer Robert Noortman is selling Portrait of a Man in a Red Doublet for around €26 million.

Rembrandts, despite their obvious cachet for collectors, have traditionally had a hard time selling because their enormous value limits the pool of collectors with the cash to buy them, and also because most of the best work is already in public museums, leaving gloomy also-rans like Self-Portrait with Shaded Eyes to the private market. Exchange rates have also shut out all but the richest American collectors, and we have to imagine that the risk of buying something that turns out not to be a real Rembrandt is also giving potential buyers the fantods.

LINK: Telegraph > Art sales: old Master seeks new owner

ABOVE: Detail from Henri Matisse’s Luxembourg Gardens, one of four paintings stolen in Rio de Janeiro in late February. It turned up yesterday on a Russian auction site.

One of the four paintings stolen from the Chacara do Ceu museum in Rio de Janeiro during a Carnival parade on February 24 turned up for sale on a Russian auction website, Interpol revealed on Monday (yes, we’re kind of late to this party). Matisse’s Luxembourg Gardens was posted for sale for about four hours on the Mastak site, with an asking price of US$13 million.

The Russian connection gives some credence to the theory that the heist was a collaboration between illicit foreign art dealers and drug traffickers, but Brazilian police say they believe the four paintings—a Monet, Picasso, Matisse, and a Dali, the pride of the Chacara’s collection and worth about US$50 million total—are still in Rio. They believe that the thieves (who not only hustled the four paintings out into the crowd still in their frames, but also mugged some tourists inside the museum for good measure) are trying to liquidate their loot for cash to fund drug smuggling. Sound familiar?

LINK: Sydney Morning Herald > Stolen Matisse on auction website

ABOVE: Detail from Paul Gauguin’s Deux Femmes (1902), which sold for £12,328,000 last week at Sotheby’s.

The Telegraph writes today with a certain dry wistfulness about the art auctions’ recent return to “irrational exuberance,” in the words of one observer, but it cautions that the huge Sotheby’s sale of Impressionist and modern art, which racked up total sales of £130 million, is not really a return to the overblown sales of the 1980s. For one thing, the number of paintings under the hammer at last week’s sale is quite large in comparison to the auctions of 20 years ago, when a big sale might clock in at 30 to 40 top-drawer items. The Sotheby’s sale last week topped 70 pieces, and a similar Christie’s sale broke the 100 item-mark, so the auction houses are certainly doing record-breaking sales, but they’re having to churn through dozens more paintings a night to get there.

Paul Gauguin’s Deux Femmes, above, for instance, sold for its lowest estimate (Sotheby’s added on the $1.3 million for their fee) and had only 2 bidders. The Impressionist market, the Telegraph says, is looking exhausted, with fewer good pieces coming up for sale. And the market has also moved on, these days favouring later modern pieces from the 1920s and 30s. On an optimistic note, however, the Telly notes that the buyers at these auctions are a more diverse group geographically and the number of collectors paying more than £1 million for a work has increased times three since the 80s. More buyers, paying more, but the overall picture for Impressionist auctions is looking a little, um, impressionistic.

LINK: Telegraph > Art sales: return to ‘irrational exuberance’

ABOVE: Detail from Romare Bearden’s Home to Ithaca (1977). Art by African Americans is predicted to explode in popularity—and profitability—in the coming decade. One collector says Bearden is the most undervalued artist in America today.

Let’s pick a sentence from this week’s edition of BusinessWeek and just think about it, really ponder it for a while: commenting that he thinks art by black artists is just starting to catch on with wealthy white investors, one expert says, and we quote, “There isn’t much else to collect that hasn’t been overexploited.”

Let’s just take a second, let that sink in.

Yeah, so, uh, looks like it’s time for those African Americans to be exploited, huh? After decades of neglect by mainstream collectors, they’re going to come charging in, Amexes at the ready, oohing and aahing at artists they couldn’t give a damn about before they got the whiff of profitability around them. Charming. Naturally, we have mixed feelings about this, since it also means that a) long-obscure artists will finally get some play; b) it will bring the price for African American artists into parity with their paler colleagues; and c) the people who supported black artists when no one else did will make a killing if they choose to sell. So maybe this is equality, even if it seems kind of crass. Too bad you missed the National Black Fine Art Show, which closed yesterday. Happy Black History Month!

LINK: BusinessWeek > Black Art Is Buried Treasure

ABOVE: Detail from John Brack’s The Bar (1954), which has already provoked record-breaking estimates on its auction price.

It’s summertime in Australia, and the living is easy. The hot-ish Australian contemporary art market has puffed The Bar, a newly available painting by Australian artist John Brack, into the rarefied, oxygen-starved, braincell-killing stratosphere inhabited by major collectors. The painting is expected by auctioneer Sotheby’s to fetch upward of AU$2 million, a record for any 20th century Australian painting, and not quite 300 percent more than Brack’s previous high seller, which went for AU$530,000 only two years ago. If, that is, The Bar actually reaches that price point. But the painting is considered a better one than Collins St., 5 p.m., a Brack painting which is a prized possession of the National Gallery of Victoria.

The Bar was snapped up by a Melbourne collector when it first showed in 1955 for 90 guineas (who knows what the hell a guinea was worth, but rest assured it was a bargain in the long run), and that collector’s death just last month has placed the painting on the block. So far as we can tell, there’s no date for the sale yet, but it’ll be sometime this spring.

LINK: The Age > Money on The Bar

ABOVE: Detail from Canaletto’s Venice, the Grand Canal, Looking Northeast from Palazzo Balbi to the Rialto Bridge (circa 1730), the most expensive art purchase of 2005.

Finally, a list we can approve of. That “greatest painter” nonsense from earlier in the year was a methodological atrocity, based on totally subjective criteria and blut statistical instrumentation. Luckily, the bean-counters at Forbes ride to the rescue today with a rundown of the most expensive art auction purchases of the year. It’s positively mathemagic.

The duopoly of Sotheby’s and Christie’s control 95% of all worldwide art auctions, Forbes notes. Christie’s moved $759 million worth of merchandise through its New York outlet alone, but Sotheby’s had the distinction of hammering the largest single price for a painting this year, a Canaletto (above), which fetched $32.6 million from an anonymous phone buyer. Spokesbots for both Sotheby’s and Christies were preening for the press and remain bullish—well of course they would, wouldn’t they?—for 2006, predicting that all those newly minted Russian oil billionaires and Indian techno-tycoons will move on the art market in a serious way, keeping prices buoyant.

LINK: Forbes > Most Expensive Art 2005

ABOVE: Detail from Stephen Foss’s Untitled 18, recently recovered in California after a sting operation.

Today we introduce ADD Abridged, a less wordsome variation on ADD, which will last the rest of the week, for a number of reasons, all too crushingly dull to detail here. Our windedness will elongate again, as per usual, next week.

Sting in San Fran — Your average thieves-steal-car, car-contains-art, police-establish-complex-sting-operation love story. SF Examiner > Stolen art recovered after sting operations

Bi(ennial) in Shanghai — Shanghai unveils theme of 2006 Shanghai Biennial: “Hyperdesign,” to be dress rehearsal for 2010 World Expo. Xinhua > 6th Shanghai Art Biennial slated for next Sep

Indian income increase — Fledgling Indian contemporary art auction house Saffronart sets record with $12.5 million sale. Rediff > Auction of India art fetches Rs 55 cr in NYC

See you tomorrow with more extra-concise goodness…

ABOVE: detail of David Smith’s CUBI XXVIII (1965), which became the most expensive piece of contemporary art ever sold at auction on Wednesday night, when Sotheby’s brought the hammer down for $23.8 million.

It seems like only yesterday that we were talking about record prices for postwar art. Wait—we were just talking about it yesterday. Only one day after a Christie’s auction set a number of auction records for post-war and contemporary art, the yang to their ying, Sotheby’s, topped them by taking the highest price ever paid at auction for a piece of contemporary art. David Smith’s CUBI XXVIII was sold to the svengaliesque dealer Larry Gagosian for a hair-peeling $23.8 million, close to double the sculpture’s already high estimate of $12 million.

The New York Times described the evening as “lifeless,” saying that the crowd seemed kind of tired, although they could just be breathless and spent from the orgy of wallet-emptying the night before at Christie’s. But still, there were some other notables: Cy Twombly’s Untitled (New York City) set a record price for a Twombly work, at $8.6 million. And, in a sale that probably says everything you need to know about the current ludicrous hotness of the art market, an Alexander Calder maquette—not the actual mobile, just the maquette—sold for $1.4 million. Ten years ago, the actual mobile—which is big enough to receive radio signals from Calcutta—went for only $1.08 million. Two words to the owner of the real mobile: sell now.

LINK: New York Times > $23.8 Million Steel Sculpture Sets Another Auction Record

ABOVE: Detail from Roy Lichtenstein’s In the Car (1963), which sold for $16.25 million on Tuesday, the highest price ever paid for a Lichtenstein work.

It was a landmark sale at Christie’s on Tuesday, when a batch of 70 post-war artworks were auctioned for $157.6 million altogether, a record total sale for art of this type. Mark Rothko’s Homage to Matisse went for more than $22 million clams, a new high-water mark for Rothko prices. Roy Lichtenstein’s famous In the Car was sold for $16.25 million, an enormous jump from previous highest price paid for a Lichtenstein work, $7.15 million just three years ago.

The International Herald Tribune says that the stratospheric prices are “the beginning of a new era” for this artistic period, and that it indicates a new confidence on the part of collectors in the art of the postwar period and into the 60s. Contemporary works by still-living artists also did well, such as Richard Prince’s Untitled (Cowboy), which also set a career high selling price of $1.28 million. So is this a new era or yet another puff into the art-market bubble?

LINK: International Herald Tribune > Record $22.4 million paid for a Rothko

ABOVE: Detail from Marc Chagall’s The Juggler (1943), which is to be sold by the Chicago Art Institute to raise needed cash.

A rash of museum sales in the U.S. are coming in the next few months, as institutions with depleted endowments and cashflow problems sell off some of of their collections. The New York Public Library touched off this little wave earlier in the year when it sold almost 20 works in order to raise money for their primary mission of collecting books. Now, the Met, the MoMA, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art all have dates at the auction block to help clean out their closets.

Art experts, the New York Times notes, are unhappy with the development, since museums have in the past gambled and lost when they reckoned which works in their collection would be important in the future. It’s also a problem for donor relations: Aunt Flo might be pissed that you re-gifted that basket of bath salts she gave you, but imagine if she’d given you a Modigliani and a few years down the road you sell it for cash. One word: Tacky! And yet, we’re not against these sales, when it comes down to it; The NYPL decided, quite sensibly, that their business is books, not paintings, and are selling their collection to people who will care for them properly. And the first director of the Museum of Modern Art, Conger Goodyear, claimed from the beginning that the museum’s collection “would have the same permanence as a river,” perpetually reflecting the changing mores of modern art, instead of a tomb for paintings. Also, the art market is totally peaking right now, so sell while the selling’s good, we say.

LINK: New York Times > Museums Set to Sell Art, and Some Experts Cringe

ABOVE: Detail from Lin Fengmian’s Four Beauties, one of 450 pieces to be sold during Christie’s first ever sale in China, on November 3.

The stampede into China took a great leap forward yesterday—pun intended—when top-shelf auction house Christie’s announced [PDF link!] that it has established a pseudo-subsidiary in Beijing. The new auction house, named, rather grandiosely, “Forever,” has a sort of arm’s-length relationship going on, in order to neatly skirt China’s foreign-ownership laws: Christie’s will put its name on the auction, its curators will appraise the works, it historians will print the catalogue, and its auctioneers will wield the hammer. What exactly Forever does, in its no doubt richly-rewarded role as puppet company, is unclear.

The first Forever-Christie’s auction will be held at the Sheraton Beijing on November 3, featuring about 450 artworks expected to fetch up to $10 million. Naturally, the hype about Asian art being what it is these days, it’s possible it could be much higher. The market for art within Asia is bigger every year, and growing in leaps and bounds; no doubt Christie’s wants a finger in that pie. But art auctions are a two-way street: just as flush Asian buyers have been snapping up art around the world for a while now, this new deal gives Christie’s a shunt directly into a very rich vein of asian art that’s in big demand in the west. Christie’s may have obeyed the letter of Chinese law in their deal with Forever, but we bet the People’s Liberation Army is none too pleased.

LINK: New York Times > Christie’s Going, Going to China [*groan* - eds.] to Hold Auctions

ABOVE: Details from two works sold at last year’s Royal College of Art Mystery Sale. The one on the left turned out to be by Damien Hirst; the right painting was by Zandra Rhodes.

Art is an exclusive business: it takes money to collect it, it takes money to show it off in galleries and keep it maintained, it takes money to insure it. You, dear reader, will more likely than not never own a piece of work by a truly important artist. It’s just plain old economics—there’s not enough supply for the demand.

But for a good cause, even the loftiest artistic talents can be persuaded to sell something for £35. In this case, the good cause in question is the Royal College of Art’s Fine Art Student Award Fund. The RCA’s annual Secret Sale works thusly: a bunch of famous artists and a bunch of nobodies paint or draw on little blank postcards, and sign the back. The catch is, they won’t tell you who did which postcard. You’ll have to just pony up your 35 quid and hope you chose right. The Times reports that people line up for days to get inside in hopes of scooping a 3 x 5 slice of artistic genius. The show is viewable from Novebmer 18 to 24, and then the buying starts on the 25th.

LINK: The Times > Can you really buy a modern master for £35? The answer’s on a postcard

ABOVE: It’s an inapt analogy, but the People’s Liberation Army of China is spending vast money and manpower on taking back chinese artifacts from Western collectors. Kind of a reverse Tomb Raider thing.

Reason #3968 to be scared shitless of the Chinese army: after centuries of art pillaging—among many other kinds of pillaging—by Western collectors, China is fighting back with some scary secret-agent shenanigans and a big pile of U.S. money. This article from the International Herald Tribune tags along with a Belgian, Giselle Croes, who has been jetting around buying rare pottery and bronzework in shady deals in shady surroundings on behalf of the People’s Liberation Army and its business arm, Poly Group. China is sitting on more than $700 billion in foreign currency and wants to buy its stuff back. As a consequence, the selling price for the type of items it’s interested in have jumped to record levels.

Croes says that Poly’s vaults contain art worth over $100 million, amassed in less than ten years. That buying spree, says the Tribune, has been at least partly funded by $200 million worth of arms sales by Poly Group in the US. The drive to reclaim thousands of pieces of Chinese art, representing pieces from 3,000 BCE to the present day, is being directed with military enthusiasm by the Zong Chan Second Division, a squad of elite officers who are directing the movements of dealers around the world, just like Ms. Croes. They’re ready to make offers you can’t refuse.

LINK: International Herald Tribune > China is racing to get its art treasures back

ABOVE: detail from Russian collective The Blue Noses Group’s Boys in the hood (2004). The work is one of hundreds being shown at FIAC 2005.

FIAC, the Paris exposition of new French and international art, opened yesterday and Bloomberg is there to tell us all about it. Seems that Paris is looking a bit creaky these days as a centre of art creation and commerce, and FIAC—the International Fair for Contemporary Art for the francoignorant—is hoping to turn the tide with a bigger and better fair this year. Bloomberg wrote in a story late yesterday that the FIAC organizers have lured in a larger proportion of foreign galleries and dealers, while trying to shake off its rep as a snooty regional affair.

It’s going to be an uphill climb: the story quotes one gallery official who proclaims that “France has the weakest art market in Europe,” and prices there are shockingly low—works by artists born after 1960 apparently sell for an average of 3,023 euros each in France, while works by the same age group in the U.S. sell for an average of 58,607 euros. Plus, London and New York have largely come to dominate the international market for high-end art, leaving Paris et al. to fight over the scraps. Think happy thoughts, FIAC, you’ll need them.

LINK: Bloomberg > Paris Strives to Revive Art Market With Fiac Contemporary Fair