Babylon Magazine | Instinto coleccionista

HUMANS ARE COLLECTORS BY NATURE. It’s part of our instinct. Children demonstrate the drive from when they are three. It is their way of organizing the world. The first collections appeared in prehistory and were linked with the supernatural. Today art moves the also supernatural figure of 60 billion euros a year. Overthrowing the construction industry and investment funds, it has become an unbeatable way of cashing in on the great riches of art heritage. It is a market that is highly globalized, in which London and New York act as glaring beacons and in which China is now leader in the number of sales.

France, the UK and Germany can all boast of having a well-established tradition of collecting. But also in Spain there are private art museums of incalculable value. Some, like the Alba family home, measure their history in generations and centuries. The Palacio de Liria, in Madrid, owned by the Duchess of Alba, opens its doors to the public every Friday. Inside its walls is the soul of our history on canvas: Fra Angelico, Titian, Velázquez, el Greco, Veronés, Rubens, Rembrandt, Goya, Picasso, Chagall.

Plácido Arango, founder of (store and restaurant chain) Grupo Vips, is another of our great collectors. He is the owner of 300 works, among which figure Zurbarán, Ribera, Tàpies, Juan Muñoz and, once again, el Greco and Goya. He donated Los Caprichos de Goya to the Museo del Prado because, as he said in declarations to the press, “It seemed incredible to me that the museum did not have a first edition. When I had the opportunity to acquire it I felt a moral duty to donate it. It?s not such an important donation”.

For his part businessman Juan Abelló can boast of being the owner of works by Ribera, Zurbarán, Goya, Picasso, Degas, Modigliani, Matisse, Francis Bacon, Van Gogh, Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec, Magritte and Dalí.

There are other names on this exclusive list, nearly always linked to great business fortunes: Esther and Alicia Koplowitz, Helga de Alvear, José Luis Várez Fisa, Carmen Thyssen. However, in general, collectors like to be discreet and hide behind anonymity. Beyond the big names, nobody can guess how many there are in Spain.

AT THE CLICK OF A MOUSE

Arteymercado.com, founded en 1998, is a high quality database with more than 2,000 links related to the art market. All the agents involved in the sector: artists, buyers, gallery owners, etc. interact there.

From this web page, Ramón Salarich highlights the level of protagonism that the Internet has taken on in the last decade: “The buyer has thousands of works within his reach, at just a click. Buying and selling are characterized today by immediacy”. There are also social networks, blogs and specialized forums.

So the new collector is “someone informed, of a high cultural level, with spending power and who enjoys art”.

“For me”, explains Salarich, “a work of art is not just a high value decorative object to be acquired as an investment. It brings pleasure beyond its value on the market.” He enjoys the search more than the acquisition. He usually limits his collecting to a very concrete group of pieces that are in keeping with his personal tastes.

In recent times, however, “investment funds and Chinese magnates have burst onto the market.”

The fact is art attracts many big fortunes for a reason that is eminently practical: it’s a good investment. A stable value. In 2010, in full crisis, trade in art grew by 50%, according to a study by the European Fine Art Foundation. The number of transactions also increased. Galleries generated 51% of the sales and the auction houses 49%.

Spain occupies a modest spot on the international panorama. It accounts for barely 0.9% of the market.

Wealth Advisory Services is a firm dedicated to acting as consultants to the very wealthy. Investment in works of art is one of its specialities. They advise when it comes to setting up collections and acquiring works. They look after all the phases of the process: studying the market, cataloguing, acquisition, restoring, and insurance policies.

It was this company that advised on the auctioning of the Fortis bank’s Valencia Contemporary Art collection, which was sold for around four million euros in London. Also for a Sorolla painting, the bidding for which reached 3.6 million euros. The name of the buyer was never made public. As Carmen Reviriego, CEO of Wealth Advisory Services, explains: “The collectors are very discreet. They flee from protagonism”.

TRADITION OR INVESTMENT

Carmen Reviriego, a winner of the national prize for women directors in business innovation remembers how, at the moment the crisis struck, the assets of the rich fell 3% at world level. In Spain, however, the collapse reached 19.5%. The reason is that many national fortunes invested their money in the now volatile property and financial markets. These figures show how “in countries like France and Germany they invest far more in art than in Spain. Here we still have a lot of work to do. Unfortunately they tend to be parochial,” she says.

What moves the Spanish collector? ?Some do it for pleasure and for family tradition , others because it is a good investment. You invest in something that you also enjoy?.

She does not believe that the vocational collector, the true art lover, is in danger of extinction: “Collecting has a rational component: a work is worth what is paid for it. But there is also an irrational component: I want something and I buy it. With art, more than making money you are increasing your assets. In Spain they still have complexes about that. In other countries it doesn?t happen. That is why we are a small market.”

Aurora Zubillaga is director of Sotheby’s in Madrid. On this same point she says: “It is true that part of the art market is made up of people interested in the financial benefits. However, it is in times of crisis like now, in which the market is quieter, when the traditional collector emerges, one who is more interested in the work than the money. Those who only focus on the financial part appear in the boom times”.

However, instead of sinking the luxury collectionist sector, the crisis has stimulated it: “For Sotheby’s 2010 and 2011 have been good years”, explains Zubillaga. “Many have invested in works of art because these are goods with an earning power that is not very volatile. And other people, unfortunately, have had to part with parts of their assets, to sell them off at auction”.

But the reality is that in Spain the outlook is grim. With less fairs and openings, with many galleries closing. Ramón Salarich, from Arteymercado.com, says that the profits of the galleries have fallen 60% in the last three years, which makes it tremendously difficult for the country?s artists to survive, especially those not established on the international scene.

Carmen Reviriego regrets this circumstance: “The Spanish artist has to be known abroad. In that way his work will be valued. In general, beyond the big names like Barceló, our artists are not as well known as they should be.”

What is the Spanish collector like? As Aurora Zubillaga defines them: “There’s a bit of everything, but the traditional style stands out”.

The names that move them most are the infallible ones: Picasso, Kandinsky, etc. In times of crisis, more conservative art, sure successes (like impressionism, for example), have retained their profitability more than contemporary creations, which offer less guarantees for not having yet passed the test of time.

BETTING ON CONTEMPORARY ART

There are many children in Spain who have inherited from their parents, not just splendid art collections but also the vocation of being a collector. There are collections that have grown and diversified for five generations or more, as is the case with the Alba family.

“That makes them living”, says Aurora Zubillaga. “A young collector connects more with the contemporary work and will take a risk with creations that will be added to the family collection, which perhaps goes back a hundred years”.

Ramón Salarich talks of a new young collector, accustomed to using the Internet as a source of information and for his buying and selling transactions. Good proof of that is Arteymercado.com itself.

However, there are some who consider that with the current scene it is very difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff. Aurora Zubillaga’s answer is: “It is true that there are duds at the international fairs. But time will tell if something is good or not. To learn how to connect with it, current art needs to be digested. You need to read a lot and see a lot. I understand that for someone who is not an aficionado this takes a lot of doing. But, yes, there are great artists”.

On 22 November Sotheby?s in London will be auctioning 30 works of 19th century Spanish artists. This auction has been held annually for 12 years. They are names that awaken the eagerness of collectors from all around the world: Santiago Rusiñol, Joaquín Mir, Hermenegildo Anglada Camarasa or Joaquín Sorolla. From the last of these they will be offering an oil painting entitled Niños en el mar. Playa de Valencia, the bidding for which is expected to reach several million euros.

In a way, collecting art has always been linked with power. It’s a luxury. Back in ancient Egypt the members of the upper classes, on being buried, made their journeys to the world of the dead accompanied by, among other things, artistic objects. It was a primitive form of collecting, related to the mysteries of life: death, divinity. But it also related to their financial capacity. The pharaohs dramatized their divine character through the creation of important collections of paintings and sculptures, with the aim of propagating and immortalizing their greatness. Also, in Greece and China, the first collections of arts and crafts were born beneath the columns of the temples and inside the tombs.

These values of religious and spiritual legitimization have been replaced by those of the markets and capitalism. Today art is venerated in other temples and at the click of a mouse. In reality, nothing has changed. The history of collecting and the history of art continue to be part of the history of human beings.