A late surge from the post-Eighties

London’s contemporary art sales last week took place very much in the shadow of New York’s spectacular $1 billion November sales, in which post-war American Abstract Expressionist and Pop Art attracted huge sums. More recent art, from the Eighties on, seemed flat by comparison and triggered a pre-London sale survey that suggested that confidence in this area was falling away.

However, the evidence of last week’s sales indicates otherwise. Although the ￡203.5 million taken by Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Phillips paled in comparison with New York, it was high for London February sales, up 9.5 per cent on last year, and included 27 record prices, most of which were for post-Eighties art.

The closest to Abstract Expressionism they got was a vigorously gestural black and white painting from 1962 by the Frenchman Pierre Soulages, who has often been compared to the American Franz Kline. The two had met in New York, and both exhibited at its Kootz Gallery. In November, Kline’s prices jumped to $40 million at auction. Last week, the leap for Soulages was also dramatic, as his 1962 painting far exceeded his auction record to fetch ￡3.3 million.

But the post-war selection was more remarkable for the solidity of its returns. At Sotheby’s, a small Francis Bacon triptych of self-portraits tripled the price it fetched six years ago from an Italian collector, selling for ￡13 million to the German tobacco tycoon Jürgen Hall.

At Christie’s, the sombre 1954 Bacon portrait Man in Blue, from the Norwich Union collection, which four years ago did not sell with an estimate of ￡4 million to ￡6 million, attracted bidding from several dealers before selling for ￡5 million. Also at Christie’s, a scarlet 1964 canvas with a single slash down its centre by Lucio Fontana, bought in 1996 for ￡117,000, sold for close to ￡4 million to the art consultant Andrew Stramentov.

However, there were more records and bigger mark-ups for recent art. The stand-out record of the week was the ￡7.6 million given for The Architect’s Home in the Ravine, painted in 1991 by Edinburgh-born Peter Doig. Originally sold for $10,000 to the accountants Arthur Anderson, it was bought at auction in 2002 by Charles Saatchi for $418,000. In 2007, Saatchi sold it with six other Doigs to Sotheby’s for $11 million. Sotheby’s then sold one of them, White Canoe, to the Georgian billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili for ￡5.7 million, making Doig briefly the most expensive living European artist. The Architect’s Home, meanwhile, was sold in New York, also in 2007, for $3.6 million to an American collector who sold it for a hefty profit last week. The buyer, described by Christie’s as a “private European” (which would include Russia and former Soviet states), was, intriguingly, the same as the buyer for the Soulages.

Other records were obtained for Doig’s former student Hurvin Anderson, for Adrian Ghenie, a Romanian artist recently taken on by the powerful Pace Gallery, and for the recent Turner Prize contender George Shaw, whose early painting of a telephone box sold for a triple estimate ￡51,650.

There were also records for sculptures of a snowman by Gary Hume, of a fat car by the Austrian Erwin Wurm, for abstract paintings by the Americans Wade Guyton and Carroll Dunham, and for a painting of a bullet hole by Nate Lowman, which sold to New York dealer Stellan Holm for a quadruple estimate ￡337,250. Artists making paintings with chewing gum (Adam McEwen), Plasticine (Dan Rees – a new Saatchi favourite), and latex (Ryan Sullivan) in the last few years were on a roll.

Similarly, works bought a decade or more ago saw massive returns. A sculpture of a car bonnet by Richard Prince, bought in 1995 for $8,625, sold to London and New York dealer Per Skarstedt for $490,000). A silver painting by Rudolf Stingel was bought 10 years ago for $4,800 and sold for $188,400).

Not all contemporary art is going up. A painting by Franz Ackermann, once favoured by the likes of Saatchi and Frank Cohen, fell from ￡193,000 in 2006 to ￡55,000. But while Gerhard Richter’s abstract paintings are no longer gaining value, Damien Hirst’s market, which had been falling, appears to be stabilising.

Almost 70 years after World War II, France is making one of its biggest efforts to trace the Jewish owners of artworks stolen by the Nazis, recovered by the Allies and sent to the country after the war. President Francois Hollande’s government is setting up a group of historians, regulators, archivists and curators to actively track down families, instead of waiting for claimants to come forward. The group starts working in March.

“It may be one of our last chances to find the owners,” said Jean-Pierre Bady, a former director at the culture ministry, who’s a member of a 1999-created Commission for the Compensation of Spoliation Victims and who was instrumental in the formation of the group. “Seventy years is a long time, but it’s never too late to make things right.”

The Nazis seized hundreds of thousands of works of art from Jewish private collections between 1933 and 1945 as part of their policy of racial persecution in what has been seen as the biggest such heist in history. Much of the art was returned to national governments, with unclaimed pieces landing in museums.

In France, the Hollande government’s plan would mark the first effort to reach out to victims of the Nazis since 1995 when former President Jacques Chirac for the first time recognized France’s responsibility for collaborating in anti- Semitic persecutions during the country’s occupation by the Germans, acknowledging the deportation of Jewish people.