LONDON — October is the cruelest month. At least, that is the view of many in the contemporary art world, as they struggle to keep up with all the fairs, auctions, exhibitions, happenings, talks, dinners, parties and deals that make up the mania of London’s “Frieze Week.”
Since first pitching its tent in Regent’s Park in 2003, during the dog days of the Young British Artists, or YBA’s, the Frieze Art Fair, with its reputation for being the place where the Next Big Thing might just emerge, has become a must-attend event for many of the world’s most influential collectors, advisers and curators.
“It would be hard for me to miss this,” said Amy Cappellazzo, the co-founder of Art Agency, Partners, and the former co-head of Christie’s postwar and contemporary art department. “‘Frieze Week’ aggregates a lot. There are the fairs and auctions, but there’s also an iceberg of private transactions hidden below.”
The presence of so many significant players in town has been an opportunity too good to miss for London’s auction houses. Since the mid-2000s, Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Phillips have expanded their mid-season contemporary sales that coincided with Frieze.
At first these October offerings were relatively modest, mixing lower-priced works by younger artists with medium-value pieces by established, mainly European names. Now, as the prices of works by both young and established names spiral upward in sync with the wealth of the 0.1 percent, all three houses offer evening and day auctions that rival their February and July seasons in commercial importance.
This October’s Frieze Week sales — which, as usual, include evening sessions of Italian art at Sotheby’s and Christie’s — are estimated to raise as much as £263.7 million, or about $428 million. This unprecedented upper valuation, if achieved, would eclipse what seemed to be bumper takings of £200 million at the equivalent London auctions in July.
The 2014 Frieze auctions have been controversially bolstered by Christie’s stand-alone evening sale of 44 works from the collection of Agnes and Karlheinz Essl. Mr. Essl is the founder of Austria’s financially troubled bauMax hardware store chain. Estimated to be worth £39.9 million to £56.8 million, the group of works, containing paintings by sought-after German artists from the 1970s and 1980s such as Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke, Martin Kippenberger and Georg Baselitz, is the most valuable contemporary-art collection from a single owner to have been offered at the company’s London salesroom, Christie’s said.
“It’s important to keep the ‘Frieze Sale’ brand,” said Francis Outred, Christie’s European head of postwar and contemporary art. “We combine young material with works that have influenced younger artists. The Essl sale is a real Who’s Who of the artists who are influential today.”
BauMax bordered on insolvency after an unsuccessful expansion in Turkey and Eastern Europe. This year, in an effort to save the company and its jobs, Mr. Essl offered to sell his entire collection of about 7,000 works, which are housed in a private museum at Klosterneuburg, near Vienna, to the Austrian state. The offer was declined. However, on Sept. 2, the Austrian newspapers Die Presse and Kurier reported that an agreement had been reached with the Austrian industrialist Hans Peter Haselsteiner, who provided collateral for a new company that has bought the collection for more than €100 million.
In the interim, the Essl collection has been cherry-picked by Christie’s. Sotheby’s, which in the last couple of years has been conceding market share to its historic rival in the all-important sector of contemporary art, was understandably incensed, having also valued the collection earlier this year. Specialists at Sotheby’s declined to discuss the matter on the record.
The star lot of the Essl collection sale at Christie’s on Oct. 13, the night before the Frieze Art Fair VIP preview, will be the 1985 Gerhard Richter abstract “Netz,” estimated at £7 million to £10 million. Measuring almost 10 feet wide and featuring the splashes of red that make Richter abstracts all the more commercial, this oil-on-canvas was bought by the Essls at Sotheby’s, London, in 1994 for what now looks a bargain price of £199,500.
A 1992 self-portrait by the crazed but now critically revered German artist Martin Kippenberger is valued at £2.5 million to £3.5 million. Another self-portrait, dating from 1988, fetched $18.6 million at Christie’s “If I Live I’ll See You Tuesday” auction in New York in May. A rare 1972 nude self-portrait by Georg Baselitz, depicted in trademark fashion upside down, is pitched at £800,000 to £1.2 million.
Market insiders said Christie’s paid in advance for the collection. All the lots in the catalog carry a symbol denoting that the auction house has either guaranteed the lot or is “making an advance to the consignor that is secured solely by the consigned property.”
Christie’s and Sotheby’s will hold their regular evening mixed-owner sales of contemporary works on Oct. 16 and Oct. 17, respectively.
Christie’s cover lot is the 1999 painting of a Puerto Rico basketball court, “The Heart of Old San Juan,” by the London contemporary auction staple, Peter Doig. Acquired by its seller directly from the artist, it is estimated at £4 million to £6 million.
A solid part of the Sotheby’s auction will be artists associated with the conceptual Zero movement. Founded in Germany in the late 1950s and early 1960s by Heinz Mack and Otto Piene, but subsequently embracing an international network of artists, Zero will be the focus of an exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York opening on Oct. 10. Like last year’s Japanese Gutai movement show at the Guggenheim, this is just the sort of awareness-raising exhibition that can bolster demand for featured artists.
Sotheby’s evening sale includes the fiery 1961 Piene abstract, “Rauchbild,” and the minimalist white 1959 Mack relief painting, “Die Vibration der Stille.” Both are estimated to sell for as much as £250,000.
International bidders at Sotheby’s will probably be most excited by Piero Manzoni’s monumental 1958-1959 kaolin-on-pleated canvas “Achrome” that heads the company’s sale of Italian art. One of just nine of the Zero-associated artist’s large-scale relief paintings depicting folded cloth, this 5-foot-wide canvas has never appeared at auction before and is estimated at £5 million to £7 million. Italian postwar classics by globally admired names such as Manzoni and Lucio Fontana have been viewed by many collectors as a safe haven after the speculative excesses of the last art market boom.
Sotheby’s is also offering a rare group of four Italian Zero group works from the extant “Beetle” house that the modernist designer Gio Ponti completed in 1969 for the collector Giobatta Meneguzzo at Malo, near Vicenza. Enrico Castellani’s 9-foot-wide minimalist white relief canvas, “Superficie Bianca,” is deemed the most significant of the works removed from the house and is estimated at £1 million to £1.5 million.
With its presale upper estimate of £33.5 million, Sotheby’s 49-lot Italian auction has the edge over the equivalent 66-lot offering at Christie’s, which has a maximum valuation of £32.4 million. But overall, art world observers continue to note the widening gap in values between Sotheby’s and Christie’s contemporary art auctions. Thanks in great part to its proactive cherry-picking of the Essl collection, Christie’s Frieze Week sales carry an upper estimate of £150.4 million, against £82.6 million at Sotheby’s.
“We’re seeing Christie’s repositioned as the premier auction house,” said Fabian Bocart, director of quantitative research at the Brussels-based art investment advisers Tutela Capital. “When people want to sell, they’re more attracted to Christie’s. Sotheby’s is lagging behind.”
That said, Mr. Bocart acknowledged that Christie’s, unlike Sotheby’s, is a privately owned company with no obligation to publish its profit or loss.
Were Christie’s reaping handsome profits (virtually unknown in the fine art auctioneering business) by beating Sotheby’s rival pitches for consignments, then it presumably would not have had to introduce in August a companywide “success fee” of 2 percent for sellers whose lots achieve more than the high estimate.
“My clients often say it’s a pity that Sotheby’s is the only auction house quoted on the stock exchange,” Mr. Bocart said.
Meanwhile, Phillips, also privately held, continues to specialize in the sort of art by younger, emerging names that draws more than 60,000 people every year to the Frieze Art Fair. The company, owned by the Moscow-based Mercury Group, will hold its inaugural contemporary art sale in its gleaming new European headquarters in Berkeley Square, in London’s West End, on the evening of Oct. 15, the day the fair opens to the public. The 47 lots are estimate to sell for as much as £23 million.
The sale starts with “Sideways,” a 2012 raw canvas-on-panel abstract composition, resembling a puzzle, by the young American artist Wyatt Kahn. It’s estimated to sell for £60,000 to £80,000.
Mr. Kahn is one of a crop of abstract painters who are currently attracting a feeding frenzy of speculative buying and re-selling among market insiders. Though this is the first time his puzzle canvases have appeared at auction, others have been resold privately for more than $200,000, said Peter Sumner, head of contemporary art for Phillips.
“I think younger art is really oversubscribed at the moment. The entry level is too high,” Ms. Cappellazzo of Art Agency, Partners, said. “I’d short the emerging market. I’m not long here.”
But as ever during Frieze Week, there will be plenty of people running around London eager to differ.