Art Markets Workshop

Description

The Impressionist movement originated in France during the sixties and seventies of the nineteenth century, and remains to this day one of the most celebrated schools of painting worldwide. Although the artists involved did manage to sell their art during the first round of exhibitions they organised themselves in Paris during the 1870s, their real fame in terms of monetary value – and perhaps in terms of artistic appreciation as well – dates from more or less a century after these works of art were painted. The market for impressionist pictures is the focus of this paper. Concretely, we zoom in on a selection of painters related to the impressionist movement and trace their sales during the years 1986-2014. Our database enables us not only to observe the ups and downs of the market over this time period in detail, but more specifically it sheds light on what happened after the bubble in the late 1980s-early 1990s had burst. It is known that by 2005 the market for impressionist art had recovered, but in this paper we analyse how this process took place. This is of interest because it has been suggested that the works bought by Japanese collectors during the impressionist bubble found their way back to the market around the turn of the century, but this has not been empirically tested. Therefore, this paper questions whether there is any evidence whether significant quantities of impressionist works flowed back onto the market in the 1990s and, why and if, hammer prices by that time had recovered from the crash a decade earlier. Our research aims to gauge the volatility in the market for impressionist paintings, whereby we primarily look at the (heightened) frequency of sales and also to some degree the variance in prices paid at auction.

Period	2016
Event type	Workshop
Location	BrusselsShow on map