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Christie's is an art business and a fine arts auction house, currently the world's largest, with sales for the first half of 2012, some $3.5 billion, representing the highest total for a corresponding period in company and art market history.

Christie's has its main headquarters in London on King Street and Rockefeller Plaza in New York. It is owned by Groupe Artémis, the holding company of François-Henri Pinault.


Founding

The official company literature states that founder James Christie conducted the first sale in London, England, on 5 December 1766, 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 of Christie's sales dating from 1759 have also been traced. Christie's soon established a reputation as a leading auction house, and took advantage of London's new found status as the major centre of the international art trade after the French Revolution. From 1859, the company was called Christie, Manson & Woods. In 1958, it established its first overseas office, by placing a representative in Rome. The first overseas salesroom opened in Geneva, where Christie's holds jewellery auctions.


1973–1999

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 P.L.C. from 1976 to 1988, until handing over to Lord Carrington, and later was a non-executive member of the board of directors until 1992. The auction house's subsidiary Christie's International Inc. held its first sale in the United States in 1977, 13 years later than Sotheby's. Christie's growth was slow but steady since 1989, when it had 42 percent of the auction market. In 1990, the company reversed a longstanding policy and guaranteed a minimum price for a collection of artworks in its May auctions. In 1996, the auction house's sales eclipsed Sotheby's for the first time since 1954. However, its profits did not grow at the same pace; from 1993 through 1997, Christie's annual pretax profits were about $60 million, whereas Sotheby's annual pretax profits were about $265 million for those years.

In 1993, Christie's paid $10.9 million for the London gallery Spink & Sons, which specialised in Oriental art and British paintings; the gallery was run as a separate entity from the auction house. The company bought Leger Gallery for $3.3 million in 1996, and merged it with Spink to become Spink-Leger. Spink-Leger was closed in 2002. To make itself competitive with Sotheby's in real estate, Christie's bought Great Estates in 1995, then the largest network of independent real estate brokers in North America, changing its name to Christie's Great Estates Inc.


1998 takeover

In December 1997, Christie's put itself on the auction block, but after two months of negotiations with a consortium led investment firm SBC Warburg Dillon Read, it did not attract a bid high enough to accept. In May 1998, François Pinault's holding company, Groupe Artémis S.A., first bought 29.1 percent of the company for $243.2 million, and subsequently purchased the rest of it in a deal that valued the entire company at $1.2 billion. The company has since not been reporting profits, though it gives sale totals twice a year. Its policy, in line with U.K. accounting standards, is to convert non-U.K. results using an average exchange rate weighted daily by sales throughout the year. In 2002, Christie's France held its first auction in Paris.

Like Sotheby's, Christie's became increasingly involved in high-profile private transactions. In 2006, Christie's offered a reported $21 million guarantee to the Donald Judd Foundation and displayed the artist's works for five weeks in an exhibition that later won an AICA award for "Best Installation in an Alternative Space". In 2007 the auction house brokered a $68 million deal that transferred Thomas Eakins's The Gross Clinic (1875) from the Jefferson Medical College at the Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia to joint ownership by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. That same year, Haunch of Venison, a contemporary art gallery which since 2002 had successfully conducted back-room sales of secondary-market works by major artists such as Francis Bacon, Andy Warhol, and Damien Hirst from its locations in London and Zürich, became a subsidiary of Christie’s International plc. Under the original deal, the gallery was meant to be the channel for all of Christie's private-client business as well as the focus of its primary trade. Also, the auction house originally announced that Haunch employees could not bid at auction because of conflicts of interest or issues of market manipulation, but later abandoned this rule. While Christie's eventually retained the brand name and repositioned Haunch as purely a primary-focused gallery, any secondary-market activities were taken over by the auction house's post-war and contemporary department. Today, the gallery continues to operate as an independent company in London and New York, and again handles all of its secondary market activities itself.

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. In January 2009, Christie's was reported to employ 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; later news reports said that 300 jobs would be cut. With sales for premier Impressionist, Modern, and contemporary artworks tallying only $US248.8 million in comparison to $US739 million just a year before, a second round of job cuts began after May 2009 when the auction house was still reported to employ 1,900 people worldwide. One of the auction house's "rainmakers" in the sale of Impressionist and Modern art, Guy Bennett, resigned from the auction house just prior to the beginning of the summer 2009 sales season. Although the economic downturn has encouraged some collectors to sell art, others are unwilling to sell in a market which may yield only bargain prices.


Today

In September 2010, former Rodale president Steven Pleshette Murphy became the first American CEO in the history of the auction house. Shortly after, the Financial Times reported that Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani was interested in acquiring the company. As of 2012, Impressionist works, which dominated the market during the 1980s boom, have been replaced by contemporary art as Christie’s top category. Asian art was the third most-lucrative area. With income from classic auctioneering falling, treaty sales made £413.4 million ($665 million) in the first half of 2012, an increase of 53% on the same period last year; they now represent more than 18% of turnover.




(photo source galleristny.com)