Four Decades in an Evolving Market


Autumn 2014


FOUR DECADES IN AN EVOLVING MARKET


Huon Mallalieu looks back at the changes in the years since LAPADA’s foundation


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APADA The Association of Art & Antique Dealers is 40 years old this year, giving cause for reflection on the way the market – and ev-


erything else – has changed over those four decades. 1974 began with the Three-Day Week, restricting the commercial use of electricity to three specified consecutive days, and TV broadcasts ended at 10.30pm. This was caused by the oil crisis following the Yom Kip- pur War, which saw the price of Middle Eastern oil rise from $3 in October 1973 to $12 in March, the effects be- ing exacerbated by the miners’ work to rule. Not only was petrol – at 42p per gallon (£4.20 now) - virtually unobtainable, but many of life’s other amenities were in very short supply – lavatory paper was particularly difficult to find. The Three-Day Week ended with the Heath Government in March, as Harold Wilson com- pounded with the miners. The year also saw the first British McDonald’s, ABBA’s Eurovision victory with ‘Waterloo’ and, on a more positive note, the first Good Beer Guide and Rubik’s invention of his Cube. In the previous decade inflation had nearly halved the pound’s purchasing power. In 1974 it reached a 34- year high of 17.2%, and the attrition continued: £100 then would have been worth £290 in 1984 and more than £1,000 today. However, provided they had liquid- ity and high quality stock, business boomed for many in the art and antiques trade. This is not uncommon in times of financial crisis, since art may hold its value better than shares and other commodities. In The Ob- server on May 26, Sir Hugh Casson, PRA, railed against such saleroom records as £340,000 for Picasso and £102,833 for Dali: ‘Is it priggish or naive to find such news items increasingly repellent? Who – apart from a few owners, dealers and insurance brokers – benefits from such absurd cascades of gold? Not the museums, for whom the purchase of a single minor work can al- most exhaust an annual budget. Not institutions... who can no longer afford the huge insurance needed to bor-


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Above Victorian paintings such as P.H. Stretton’s On Guard, Haynes Fine Art, were fashionable in the 1970s and are still popular today.


row works from abroad... Not the modest collector, for whom such price-tags are a bad joke. Not the living art- ist, as now it is, with few exceptions, these prices are fetched only by the dead.’ That last sentence may shock a modern reader, as


now it is much more likely that outrageous prices will only be paid for the work of living or recently deceased artists. Then, not only were Old Masters still revered, but Victorian paintings and brown furniture were booming, and English watercolours enjoying the height of favour. The art dealer Richard Green was hoovering up land and townscapes by the Koekkoek family, Cor- nelis Springer and other 19th century Dutch painters at what seemed unbelievable prices – up to £30,000. The major London auction houses – Sotheby’s,


Christie’s, Phillips, Bonhams, Sotheby’s Belgravia and Debenham Coe (reborn as Christie’s South Kensing- ton during the year) – often held at least one sale a day during their season. This was also a decade of great country house contents sales. Compared to today, sup-


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