In A Peep at Christies (1799), James Gillray caricatured actress Elizabeth Farren and huntsman Lord Derby examining paintings appropriate to their tastes and heights.
Founding
The official company literature states that founder James Christie (1730–1803) conducted the first sale in London on 5 December 1766,[8] and the earliest auction catalogue the company retains is from December 1766. However, other sources note that James Christie rented auction rooms from 1762, and newspaper advertisements for Christie's sales dating from 1759 have also been traced.[9] After his death, Christie's son, James Christie the Younger (1773–1831) took over the business.[10]
20th century
The Microcosm of London (1808), an engraving of Christie's auction room
Christie's was a public company, listed on the London Stock Exchange, from 1973 to 1999. In 1974, Jo Floyd was appointed chairman of Christie's. He served as chairman of Christie's International plc from 1976 to 1988, until handing over to Lord Carrington, and later was a non-executive director until 1992.[11] Christie's International Inc. held its first sale in the United States in 1977. Christie's growth was slow but steady since 1989, when it had 42% of the auction market.[12]
Clay tablet, a record of barley and emmer. Late Uruk period, 3300–3100 BCE. Purchased via Christie's in 1989, no provenance. British Museum
In 1990, the company reversed a long-standing policy and guaranteed a minimum price for a collection of artworks in its May auctions.[13] In 1996, sales exceeded those of Sotheby's for the first time since 1954.[14] However, profits did not grow at the same pace;[1] from 1993 through 1997, Christie's annual pretax profits were about $60M , whereas Sotheby's annual pretax profits were about $265M for those years.[15]
In 1993, Christie's paid $10.9M for the London gallery Spink & Son, which specialised in Oriental art and British paintings; the gallery was run as a separate entity. The company bought Leger Gallery for $3.3M in 1996, and merged it with Spink to become Spink-Leger.[16] Spink-Leger closed in 2002. To make itself competitive with Sotheby's in the property market, Christie's bought Great Estates in 1995, then the largest network of independent estate agents in North America, changing its name to Christie's Great Estates Inc.[12]
In December 1997, under the chairmanship of Lord Hindlip, Christie's put itself on the auction block, but after two months of negotiations with the consortium-led investment firm SBC Warburg Dillon Read it did not attract a bid high enough to accept.[15] In May 1998, François Pinault's holding company, Groupe Artémis S.A., first bought 29.1 per cent of the company for $243.2M, and subsequently purchased the rest of it in a deal that valued the entire company at $1.2bn.[1] The company has since not been reporting profits, though it gives sale totals twice a year. Its policy, in line with UK accounting standards, is to convert non-UK results using an average exchange rate weighted daily by sales throughout the year.[17]
21st century
In 2002, Christie's France held its first auction in Paris.[18]
On 28 December 2008, The Sunday Times reported that Pinault's debts left him "considering" the sale of Christie's and that a number of "private equity groups" were thought to be interested in its acquisition.[23] In January 2009, the company employed 2,100 people worldwide, though an unspecified number of staff and consultants were soon to be cut due to a worldwide downturn in the art market;[24] later news reports said that 300 jobs would be cut.[25] With sales for premier Impressionist, Modern, and contemporary artworks tallying only US$248.8M in comparison to US$739M just a year before, a second round of job cuts began after May 2009.[26]
In 2012, Impressionist works, which dominated the market during the 1980s boom, were replaced by contemporary art as Christie's top category. Asian art was the third most lucrative area.[17] With income from classic auctioneering falling, treaty sales made £413.4 million ($665M) in the first half of 2012, an increase of 53% on the same period last year; they now represent more than 18% of turnover.[27] The company has since promoted curated events, centred on a theme rather than an art classification or time period.[28]
As part of a companywide review in 2017, Christie's announced the layoffs of 250 employees, or 12 per cent of the total work force, based mainly in Britain and Europe.[29]
In June 2021, Christie's Paris held its first sale dedicated to women artists, most notably Louise Moillon'sNature morte aux raisins et pêches.[30]
In 2022 Christie's sold $8.4bn in art and luxury goods, an all-time high for any auction house.[6][31]
From 2008 until 2013, Christie's charged 25 per cent for the first $50,000; 20 per cent on the amount between $50,001 and $1M, and 12 per cent on the rest. From 2013, it charged 25 per cent for the first $75,000; 20 per cent on the next $75,001 to $1.5M and 12 per cent on the rest.[33]
As of 2023, Christie's commission (buyer's premium) is 26 per cent of the hammer price of each lot up to £800,000/US$1,000,000, plus 21 per cent of the hammer price from £800,001/US$1,000,001 up to and including £4,500,000/US$6,000,000, and 15 per cent on the rest.[34]
Locations
As of 2023, Christie's has offices in 46 countries worldwide, with salerooms in London, New York, Paris, Geneva, Milan, Amsterdam, Dubai, Hong Kong, and Shanghai.[3]
Europe
Christie's flagship saleroom is in London on King Street in St. James's, where it has been based since 1823. It had a second London saleroom in South Kensington which opened in 1975 and primarily handled the middle market. Christie's permanently closed the South Kensington saleroom in July 2017 as part of their restructuring plans announced in March 2017. The closure was due in part to a considerable decrease in sales between 2015 and 2016 in addition to the company expanding its online sales presence.[35][36]
In early 2017, Christie's also announced plans to scale back its operation in Amsterdam.[29]
Americas
In 1977, led by then Chairman Stephen Lash, the company opened its first international branch on Park Avenue in New York City in the Delmonico's Hotel grand ballroom on the second floor;[37][38] in 1997 it took a 30-year lease on a 28,000 m2 (300,000 sq ft) space in Rockefeller Center for $40M.[39]
Until 2001, Christie's East, a division that sold lower-priced art and objects, was located at 219 East 67th Street. In 1996, Christie's bought a townhouse on East 59th Street in Manhattan as a separate gallery where experts could show clients art in complete privacy to conduct private treaty sales.[12]
Christie's opened a Beverly Hills saleroom in 1997.[40] In April 2017, in moved to a 4,500 sq ft (420 m2) two-story flagship space in Beverly Hills, designed by wHY.[41]
Asia
Christie's has been operating a space in Hong Kong's Alexandra House since 2014. In 2021, the company announced plans to move its Hong Kong headquarters to the Zaha Hadid-designed luxury tower The Henderson in 2024, where it will launch year-round auctions. Measuring more than 50,000 sq ft (4,600 m2) over four storeys, the new space, which incorporates a permanent saleroom and galleries, is comparable in size to Christie's London headquarters.[42]
Notable auctions
Pontormo, Portrait of a Halberdier, 1528–1530. Sold by Christie's for US$35.2 million in 1989. (J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles)
In March 1987, Vincent van Gogh's Vase with Fifteen Sunflowers fetched an auction record of $39.9M at Christie's, making it the most expensive painting in the world at the time, at more than three times the price of the previous worldwide record for the highest paid for any painting.[45]
In May 1989, Pontormo's Portrait of a Halberdier was sold to the J. Paul Getty Museum for $35.2M, more than tripling the previous auction record for an Old Master painting.[47]
In 1998, Christie's in New York sold the famous Archimedes Palimpsest after the conclusion of a lawsuit in which its ownership was disputed.[49]
In November 1999, a single strand necklace of 41 natural and graduated pearls, which belonged to Barbara Hutton, was auctioned by Christie's Geneva for $1,476,000.[50]
In June 2001, Elton John sold 20 of his cars at Christie's, saying he didn't drive them often because he was frequently out of the country. The sale, which included a 1993 Jaguar XJ220, the most expensive at £234,750, and several Ferraris, Rolls-Royces, and Bentleys, raised nearly £2M.[51]
In 2006, a single Imperial Qing dynasty porcelain bowl, another item which belonged to Barbara Hutton, was auctioned by Christie's Hong Kong for a price of US$19.5M.[52][53]
On 16 May 2006, Christie's auctioned a Stradivarius called The Hammer for a record US$3,544,000. It was, at that time, the most paid at public auction for any musical instrument.[54]
In November 2006, four celebrated paintings by Gustav Klimt were sold for a total of $192M, after being restituted by Austria to Jewish heirs after a lengthy legal battle.[55]
In 2006, controversy arose after Christie's auctioned artefacts known to be looted from Bulgaria.[57][58]
In November 2007, an album of eight leaves, ink on paper, by China's Ming dynasty court painter Dong Qichang was sold at the Christie's Hong Kong Chinese Paintings Auction for US$6,235,500, a world auction record for the artist.[59]
Over a three-day sale in Paris in February 2009, Christie's auctioned the monumental private collection of Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé for a record-breaking 370M euros.[64] It was the most expensive private collection ever sold at auction,[65] breaking auction records for Brâncuși, Matisse, and Mondrian.[64] The "Dragons" armchair by Irish furniture designer Eileen Gray sold for 21.9M euros, setting an auction record for a piece of 20th century decorative art.[66]
In 2009, controversy arose again after the auction of two imperial bronze zodiac sculptures (for US$36M) collected by Yves Saint Laurent, as the items had been looted in 1860 from the Old Summer Palace of Beijing by French and British forces at the close of the Second Opium War.[67]
Christie's Hong Kong, November 2009 sale of Fine Modern Chinese Paintings, sold a work by Fu Baoshi titled Landscape inspired by Dufu's Poetic Sentiments, for HK$60M (US$7.7M) – a world record for the artist.[68]
On 18 April 2012, the silver cup given to the marathon winner, Greek athlete Spyridon Louis, at the first modern Olympic Games staged in Athens in 1896 sold for £541,250, breaking the auction record for Olympic memorabilia.[71]
On 11 May 2015, Pablo Picasso's Les Femmes d'Alger ("Version O") sold for US$179.3M to an unnamed buyer, becoming the most expensive work of art ever to be sold at auction at Christie's New York. In November of the same year, Amedeo Modigliani's Nu Couché (1917–18) sold at Christie's in New York for $170.4M, making it the second most expensive work sold at auction.[77]
In May 2016, the Oppenheimer Blue diamond sold for CHF56,837,000, a record price for a jewel at auction.[78]
On 7 July 2016, the highest price ever sold for an old master painting at Christie's was achieved with £44,882,500 for Rubens' Lot and his Daughters.[79][80]
On 4 July 2019, a bust fragment of Tutankhamun was sold for £4.7M.[84] The Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities had tried to stop the auction, citing concerns that the bust had been looted from a temple and illegally taken from Egypt in the 1970s.[85]
On 25 June 2020, Christie's sold a Timurid Quran manuscript, described as "rare and breathtaking", for £7M (with fees), ten times its estimate.[86][87] The price was the highest price ever paid for a Quran manuscript.[86][87] Probably created at a Timurid prince's court, the manuscript comprised 534 folios of Arabic calligraphy on "gold-flecked, coloured paper from Ming China". The sale was criticized that since the "object apparently has no provenance prior to the 1980s, we can't know anything about the context in which it was removed from its country of origin."[86]
In May 2022, Andy Warhol's silkscreen painting Shot Sage Blue Marilyn sold at Christie's New York for $195M, making it the most expensive work of American art sold at auction and the most expensive work of 20th-century art sold at auction.[89][90]
In September and October 2022 at Christie's, the James Bond film franchise auctioned 61 lots of vehicles, watches, costumes, props, posters, and memorabilia from the 25 Bond films. The auction raised nearly £7M from 28 countries, and proceeds went to over 45 charities.[91]
In November 2022, the art collection of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen was auctioned at Christie's New York.[92] It was the biggest sale in art auction history, surpassing $1.5bn in sales. Six works sold for more than $100M: Seurat's Les Poseuses Ensemble (Petite version), ($149M, with fees); Paul Cézanne's 1888–90 La Montagne Sainte-Victoire ($138M); van Gogh'sVerger avec cyprès ($117M); and Gustav Klimt's 1903 Birch Forest ($105M). The auction also included paintings by Botticelli, David Hockney, Roy Lichtenstein, Edward Hopper, Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns and Jan Brueghel the Younger. Proceeds from the auction benefitted undisclosed philanthropies.[93][94][95]
In May 2023, the jewellery collection once owned by Austrian billionaire Heidi Horten, who died in 2022, set a record for the most valuable single collection of jewels in an auction, fetching CHF180M ($201M).[96][97] In August 2023, Christie's cancelled a second Horten jewellery sale, which had been scheduled for November, after Jewish charities and organizations refused to accept portions of the proceeds from the first sale citing the source of Horten's wealth.[98]
In November 2024 a painting by surrealist artist Rene Magritte broke an auction record, selling for more than $121 million at Christie's in New York. The previous record for a work by Magritte was $79 million, set in 2022.[99]
Criticism
Price-fixing scandal in 2000
In 2000, allegations surfaced of a price-fixing arrangement between Christie's and Sotheby's. Executives from Christie's subsequently alerted the Department of Justice of their suspicions of commission-fixing collusion.
Christie's gained immunity from prosecution in the United States as a longtime employee of Christie's confessed and cooperated with the US Federal Bureau of Investigation. Numerous members of Sotheby's senior management were fired soon thereafter, and A. Alfred Taubman, the largest shareholder of Sotheby's at the time, took most of the blame; he and Dede Brooks (the CEO) were given jail sentences, and Christie's, Sotheby's and their owners also paid a civil lawsuit settlement of $512M.[100][101][102]
Insufficient or invalid provenance for looted works
Christie's has been criticised for "an embarrassing history of a lack of transparency around provenance".[86] In 2003, Christie's was criticised for its handling of two Nazi-looted artworks claimed by heirs of the original Jewish owners. In one case, it refused to divulge to the heirs the location of an Italian painting formerly owned by Jewish Viennese banker Heinrich Graf, looted by the Gestapo.[103][104] Christie's eventually revealed the holder's name after the Jewish Community of Vienna filed a successful suit in the UK on behalf of Graf's American daughters in late 2004.[105] In the other 2003 case Christie's declined to inform the family that it had discovered that a painting consigned to it had been looted from Ulla and Moriz Rosenthal, a Jewish couple murdered in Auschwitz.[106][107]
On 19 May 2020, the craft supply company Hobby Lobby, who purchased material for loan or donation to The Museum of the Bible, filed a diversity action on the auction house regarding the sale and purchase of the Gilgamesh tablet by private sale agreement on 14 July 2014, allegedly while knowing the Iraqi-origin cuneiform object had a fake provenance.[108][109] In June 2020, they were forced to withdraw four Greek and Roman antiquities from sale after it was discovered that they came from "sites linked to convicted antiquities traffickers".[86][110] The same month, they were criticised for putting up a Benin plaque and two Igboalusi figures for auction.[111][112] The plaque was tied to similar plaques taken from Nigeria during the Benin Expedition of 1897 and remained unsold after an auction was held.[112] The alusi figures are alleged to have been taken from Nigeria during the Nigerian Civil War and were sold for €212,500 (after fees), below their low estimate of €250,000.[112][113] Christie's claims to require "verifiable documented provenance that the object was taken out of its source nation prior to the earlier date of 2000, or the date which is legally applicable between the country in which the sale takes place and the source nation".[112]
In November 2014, Christie's had to withdraw a prehistoric sculpture from Sardinia, valued at $800,000–$1.2m, put on auction by Michael Steinhardt, a US-billionaire, who was given a lifetime ban on acquiring further antiquities by the Manhattan district attorney's office in 2021.[114] After having acquired artworks with unverified provenance for years, for example by convicted art dealer Giacomo Medici, Steinhard's collection had been subjected to search warrants and investigations since 2017. He finally surrendered 180 looted and illegally smuggled antiquities valued at $70m. According to The Guardian, the district attorney said: "For decades, Michael Steinhardt displayed a rapacious appetite for plundered artefacts without concern for the legality of his actions, the legitimacy of the pieces he bought and sold or the grievous cultural damage he wrought across the globe.[115]
In February 2023 a French court ordered Christie's to unconditionally restitute Dutch painting The Penitent Magdalene, signed Adriaen van der Werff (1707), looted in 1942 from Lionel Hauser in Paris and last sold by the auction house without any provenance in London in April 2005.[116][117] Christie's had offered the Hauser heirs 50 per cent of the sale price; the heirs refused the offer and took the case to court.[118][119]
Blockchain Technology at Auctions
In 2018, Christie's began offering "digital passports" stored on the blockchain to a select number of private collectors purchasing art. These "certificates of ownership" gave the buyer a clear and transparent provenance record of the piece of art they were purchasing, a record that could never be erased or manipulated, and accessible worldwide.[120]
Six years later in October 2024, two Christie's auctions exhibited this block-chain technology in the most public events to date. In the first, on October 2, Christie's New York showcased the work of Diane Arbus and Cindy Sherman in An Eye Towards the Real: Photographs from the Collection of Ambassador Trevor Traina - a former U.S. ambassador to Austria and founder of the web3 wallet provider Kresus. Eight days later on October 10, Christie's New York auctioned Ascend, a digital work created by Ryan Koopmans and Alice Wexell, marking the first time a piece inscribed on Bitcoin's Ordinals protocol had been sold in a live auction at Christie’s. Christie's sees this "integration of physical and digital ownership" as the future of art auctioning, and the most efficient way for buyers to know they've purchased a work with as accurate and secure a provenance as possible.[121]
Christie's Fine Art Storage Services (CFASS)
Christie's first ventured into storage services for outside clients in 1984, when it opened a 100,000 square feet brick warehouse in London that was granted "Exempted Status" by HM Revenue and Customs,[122] meaning that property may be imported into the United Kingdom and stored without incurring import duties and VAT. Christie's Fine Art Storage Services, or CFASS, is a wholly owned subsidiary that runs Christie's storage operation.
In September 2008, Christie's signed a 50-year lease on an early 1900s warehouse of the historic N.Y.D. Company[123] in Red Hook, Brooklyn, and subsequently spent $30M converting it into a six-storey, 250,000 square feet[124] art-storage facility.[122] The facility opened in 2010 and features high-tech security and climate controls that maintain a virtually constant 70°[clarification needed] and 50% relative humidity.[125]
Located near the Upper Bay tidal waterway near the Atlantic Ocean, the Brooklyn facility was hit by at least one storm surge during Hurricane Sandy in 2012. CFASS subsequently faced client defections and complaints arising from damage to works of art.[123] In 2013, AXA Art Insurance filed a lawsuit in New York court alleging that CFASS' "gross negligence" during the hurricane damaged art collected by late cellist Gregor Piatigorsky and his wife Jacqueline Rebecca Louise de Rothschild.[126] Later that year, StarNet Insurance Co., the insurer for the LeRoy Neiman Foundation and the artist's estate, also filed a lawsuit in New York Supreme Court claiming that the storage company's negligence caused more than $10M in damages to Neiman's art.[127]
Educational and other ventures
Christie's Education previously offered master's degree programs in London and New York, but they were planned to be phased out in 2019. In 2020, in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd, Christie's noted that there was a lack of racial diversity in the art world, and admitted that Christie's degree programs only exacerbated these inequities.[128]
However, Christie's continue to offer non-degree programmes in London, New York, Hong Kong and Amsterdam as well as online.[129] In addition they offer an Art Business Masterclass Certificate and the Luxury Masterclass Certificate.[130]
With Bonhams, Christie's is a shareholder in the London-based Art Loss Register, a privately owned database used by law enforcement services worldwide to trace and recover stolen art.[131]
Management
Since its acquisition by François Pinault, Christie's CEOs have been as follows:
^"Christies.com – About Us". Archived from the original on 1 February 2013. Retrieved 3 December 2008. James Christie conducted the first sale in London on 5 December 1766.
^The Art Loss Register, Ltd.: "The Art Loss Register is the world's largest database of stolen art and antiques dedicated to their recovery. Its shareholders include Christie's, Bonhams, members of the insurance industry and art trade associations. " Retrieved 27 September 2008.
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