As stock markets tumbled last week, the art market retained its cool. At London’s Frieze week auctions, the contemporary art sales met targets set weeks earlier in realising £162 million, up from last year’s £90 million.  One reason for the increase was Christie’s insertion of an extra sale on Monday evening: the Essl collection, announced on this page last month, which totalled £46.7 million – just within estimate. With a surfeit of works by older generation German artists – Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke and Georg Baselitz – Polke, who is the subject of a revelatory retrospective at Tate Modern, emerged as the star. The rare painting Indian with Eagle, made on shiny Lurex in 1975 when the artist was painting very little, trebled its estimate to sell for £5.1 million to a French speaking bidder on the telephone (Messrs Pinault or Arnault perhaps?). It was the second-highest price for the artist and represents a 3,990 per cent increase over the price the Essls paid 17 years ago.  The sale also saw a new record for a sculpture by Baselitz, when a 12-foot, self-portrait wood carving of the artist as a boy, My New Hat, 2003, sold for £1.4 million. The price, though, was not so exceptional when you consider that his new sculptures also sell for that amount. But the market for Polke’s old rival, Gerhard Richter, appeared to wobble. A large abstract, Netz, 1985, was estimated to fetch £7 million, but did not sell. Later, in a private deal, it sold for a vastly reduced £5.5 million.  Richter abstracts have been a feature of the booming market, appealing to the world’s super rich and selling for as much as £21 million. So it was alarming when another, smaller example with a £1.5 million estimate did not sell at Phillips on Wednesday. This sale did better for Richter’s compatriot, Anselm Kiefer, when a large textured landscape, estimated at £400,000, sold to UK private dealer Julian Barran for £818,500. “It was the best Kiefer of the week,” said Barran, an indication that Phillips can compete with Sotheby’s and Christie’s at this level.  Phillips’s real strength, however, was in its handling of young artists. A geometrically cut-out construction of raw canvases from the Saatchi collection by American Wyatt Kahn sold to a young Parisian collector for a double-estimate £122,500, several times more than his gallery prices. Other records were set for an undulating copper sculpture by young Vietnamese-Danish artist, Danh Vo (£206,500); and for a painting of crumpled paper by the American, Tauba Auerbach (£1.1 million).  At Christie’s, Asian buyers stepped in to claim the best works by Anselm Kiefer and Martin Kippenberger; Jay Jopling paid £722,500 for Mad Tracey from Margate, Everyone’s Been There, which is a record for an appliqué blanket by Tracey Emin; and New York dealers Acquavella paid a record £578,500 for a series of resin casts of the space beneath 25 chairs by Rachel Whiteread.  But again, it was big paintings by younger artists which enjoyed the greatest competition. A splashy abstract by American Joe Bradley trebled estimates to sell to a South American buyer for a record £986,500, while a geometric painting on woven fabrics by Canadian artist Brent Wadden, from the Saatchi collection, trebled estimates to sell for £74,500.  In the final sale at Sotheby’s, Asian buyers played a major role. Buyers from China had increased by 125 per cent since last year, said Sotheby’s. One bought a horizontal abstract from 1958 by France’s most expensive living painter, Pierre Soulages, for £2.7 million, generating a 3,287 per cent gain for the seller who bought it in 2000 for £78,500. Another buyer was Indonesian collector Budi Tek, who bought a 1992 self-portrait by Martin Kippenberger for £2.3 million for his Yuz Museum in Shanghai.  Danh Vo saw a second record in as many days when a six-foot tall, gold-leaf painting of the number 9 on a background of assembled cigarette cases sold for £314,500, making him the hottest young artist of the week. Though not records, multiple-estimate prices were also paid by Asian buyers for paintings by the new young Chinese superstar, Jia Aili (£674,500) and the Romanian Adrian Ghenie (£1 million).  Reflecting the Frieze London art fair, the Frieze week auctions give younger artists more exposure by including them in select evening sales. The only question is: will they still be there next year?
At the end of Frieze week auctions, Colin Gleadell rounds up which artists are hot and which are not