From the January 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
December 2024 ended with a flurry of auctions. While no results attracted as much attention as Maurizio Cattelan’s banana, which fetched more than $6 million at Sotheby’s in New York, there was plenty of action in the Old Master sales. Giambattista Tiepolo’s Guilty Punchinello sold for £2.5 million and a pair of paintings by Johann Zoffany, depicting a flower girl and a watercress girl respectively, sold for £991,000. While both these figures are some way off the dazzling sums that post-war and contemporary art can command, they are tidy amounts for a category that can sometimes seem like an afterthought for auction businesses preoccupied with the glitzy, luxury side of the market, and with handbags. Perhaps they also offer some reassurance about the art market as a whole, as the results for contemporary auctions prove increasingly lacklustre.
Is this the first sign of a shift away from contemporary art to a more considered approach to art history? It’s tempting, as the year turns, to start making predictions of this sort. But it’s also a fool’s game. The Old Master auctions have always been proof that quality pays, and all of the top works this last season were exceptional. The Tiepolo was also a discovery, which adds a frisson to the bidding.
Consider, however, the most exciting art exhibition currently in New York, the heart of the contemporary art market. ‘Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300–1350’ opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in October and closes at the end of this month. The New York Times declared it ‘the art show of the season’. Along with the plaudits have come the crowds; one X/Twitter user described the show as ‘so sick’. An exhibition with a slightly academic title that seems narrow in focus, but is wonderfully rich in its implications, has caught the city’s imagination.
In March, the exhibition will open in London. The curators, excited by the success of the New York version, are hoping for a younger crowd. There are talks of queues around Trafalgar Square reminiscent of the National Gallery’s greatest recent success, ‘Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan’ in 2011. The exhibition sold out and the museum released a limited number of tickets each day to quench demand – some people even used the concierge service Quintessentially to save them a place in the queue.
It would be wonderful if 2025 were the year in which the art world takes Old Masters as seriously as they deserve. If the art world – a term commonly used of a fairly homogenous group of people who travel from Art Basel, to Frieze, to Paris and Miami – were to take a sincere interest in these older works, then 2025 will be an annus mirabilis. After the National Gallery’s Leonardo exhibition closed, one of the works on display, Salvator Mundi, famously became the most expensive ever sold at auction – albeit in a contemporary sale at Christie’s. And who knows if Sienese painting will be as big a hit in London as it has been in New York? Nothing invites so many different opinions as an art exhibition.
From the January 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.