Sotheby's Gives Schnabel's Market a Boost

Julian Schnabel's collectors will have taken note: one of the US artist’s early paintings sold for $307,000 with fees at Sotheby's in London and led its Discoveries sale on January 23.

The sale totaled $1.74m (£1.29m) including fees and exceeded the pre-sale high estimate but it still scored an average C on the HENI Auction Index.

Schnabel’s 1981 canvas, The sound of someone's backbone snapping, soared above its low estimate of $40,100 and was also the sale’s outperformer.

Other artists whose work far exceeded their low estimates included paintings by Karel Appel and Dorothea Rockburne and a Martin Parr photograph.

Notwithstanding these positive results, the sale was down from the C+ achieved by the auction house’s Modern Discoveries sale last October.

In January, total sales decreased 30% from the sale five months ago and were 28% less than average, despite the number of lots rising 19% to almost 100.

A metric that contributed to the score this month was the percentage of lots hammering above the low estimate. While it improved from 64% to 67%, the percentage of lots surpassing their high estimates fell slightly.

Both remain roughly in line with average.

Another metric declined slightly: the average hammer to mid-estimate ratio fell to 1, which is 40% below the average of 1.7 in recent comparable sales.

The percentages of lots bought-in and withdrawn were in line with average.

Schnabel’s auction record belongs to Ethnic Type #14 (1984), which fetched $1.45m with fees in 2017 at Christie’s, itself far from stratospheric.

While a far cry from that benchmark, the strong showing of his 1981 canvas, which made its debut at the main exhibition of the 1982 Venice Biennale, will be welcome news for collectors of an artist whose market has famously blown hot and cold since he was red hot in the early 1980s.