Da Vinci, Dinosaurs, and Drama

The high-end auction market is filled with intrigue, mystery, and sometimes scandal. It is a world comprised of artists, dealers, celebrities, and even royalty. Each work of art has its own story – some easier to tell than others. That is what we hope to uncover below.

In the parlance of the art auction industry, consignors typically sell their property as a result of the four Ds: death, debt, divorce, or disaster. In the world of marketing, practitioners traditionally operate using the four Ps: product, price, promotion, and placement. However, based on my experience, marketers rarely control the four Ps in an auction house. The works or “product” that come up for sale are unknown until one of the four Ds occurs. The price is set by the specialists. The promotion, while managed by the marketing team, often reads like a legal contract; and the exhibition location or “placement” is predetermined. Nevertheless, the marketing manager must tell a compelling story for the top “lots” in the sale. That narrative flows naturally when describing a work by Georgia O’Keeffe in an American Art auction or a Ming ceramic in an Asia Week sale, but what happens when that convention is upended? Christie’s, the internationally acclaimed auction house founded in 1766, provides two outstanding examples from 2017 and 2020.

The Invention of Salvator Mundi

The first scenario reads like a movie script. The story spans centuries and involves royalty, art dealers, Russian oligarchs, and one of the most important artists in history. At the center of the epic sits a picture entitled Salvator Mundi, or Savior of the World, purportedly painted by the Renaissance master Leonardo da Vinci. The painting set the world record for the most expensive work of art sold at auction when Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, purchased the painting for a staggering sum over $450 million in November 2017. In a saga filled with mystery, the sale price added to the intrigue, but so too did the deliberate decision to place the work in the Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Sale. Traditionally, an auction house would place a work of this caliber painted circa 1500 in an Old Master Paintings sale. Instead, the depiction of Christ was surrounded by works created by Warhol, Rothko, Bourgeois, and Marshall. Loic Gouzer, the Chairman of the department in New York justified the decision in the press release this way: “the work of Leonardo is just as influential to the art that is being created today as it was in the 15th and 16th centuries.” He continued that offering the work in this sale “is a testament to the enduring relevance of this picture.” This reasoning, however, obscures the tremendous groundswell of momentum that surrounded the rediscovery of this picture, which many thought lost to history. 

In order to understand how Salvator Mundi became the most expensive piece of art in the world, let’s look back in time. The Royal collection of King Charles I (1600-1649) first recorded the painting. It later appeared in other documentation but then disappeared until 1900 when it resurfaced in the Cook Collection attributed to Leonardo’s follower, Bernardino Luini. In 1958, Sotheby’s sold the work for a mere £45 before it vanished again. Then in 2005 an art speculator named Alexander Parish found the picture listed on the website of the New Orleans Auction Gallery. At the time, however, he did not recognize it as the long lost work of da Vinci. Together, he and a friend named Robert Simon, who owned a gallery on the Upper East Side, purchased the lot for $1,000. The costs, however, continued to mount year after year as researchers and restorers worked on the picture. Finally, the high storage costs and insurance premiums seemed to payoff when the work was attributed to da Vinci. As Matthew Shaer writes in his fascinating Vulture article, the entire chronicle is a “parable of highbrow greed, P.T. Barnum-style salesmanship, and reputation laundering.” After years of existing in obscurity with an unknown origin, the picture finally reached a major milestone. The National Gallery in London decided to feature the work in their 2011 da Vinci exhibition as an “autograph” Leonardo. The occasion was momentous because there are fewer than 20 pictures in the world attributed to da Vinci and only Salvator Mundi was in private hands. This decision signaled a major stamp of approval and visitors flocked to the museum. The National Gallery sold out most of their tickets and extended their hours to accommodate more guests. While the public may have loved the show, others did not. Carlo Pedretti, a former chair in Leonardo studies at UCLA issued a sharply worded critique in the Vatican’s newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano. In his opinion piece, Pedretti wrote that the picture’s admirers should beware of “the sophisticated marketing operation” at play. In the span of just six years, the painting ascended from a regional auction house to a world-renowned museum whose prestige legitimated and promoted the work as authentic. 

In 2013, after the exhibition, the work changed hands twice and eventually landed in the possession of Dmitry Rybolovlev, a Russian oligarch, for over $120 million. Finally, in 2017, the work arrived at Christie's. At this stage, the leadership team faced the critical choice about which auction to sell the picture in. As Shaer uncovered in his article, an unidentified source explained that money likely motivated the decision because “Contemporary sales tend to be splashier than their old-master counterparts, and ‘there wouldn’t be as much scrutiny. It became all about the marketing, and it was brilliantly marketed.’” First the National Gallery raised the prominence of the work through their exhibition promotion and then Christie’s made the upcoming auction into a spectacle. Christie’s has excelled in generating tremendous buzz for their sales. In this case, they toured the work around the globe, which garnered over 30,000 visitors. They then released a dramatic short film that captured spectators’ experience viewing the work. Leonardo DiCaprio makes a fleeting appearance and the video was symbolically edited to 4 minutes and 14 seconds to reflect da Vinci’s depiction of Christ according to the Gospel of John 4:14: “And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent his Son as the Saviour of the World.” The marketing campaign, therefore, made the picture relevant, thereby manifesting Gouzer’s vision outlined in the press release a month before the auction.

Over three years later, the infamous picture still makes headlines. It has become a pawn in geopolitical spats between Saudia Arabia and France. It is the subject of a new documentary called The Savior for Sale, and it even entered the realm of NFTs or non-fungible tokens when an art historian minted and subsequently sold a version of the painting with Christ holding a wad of cash.            

The King of Dinosaurs

Outside of the revolutionary sale of Salvator Mundi, there is another example from Christie’s where a lot in a sale bucked all convention. On October 6, 2020, the auction house hosted its 20th Century Evening Sale, which typically “tracks the major movements of the modern art canon.” Think Cezanne, Picasso, Pollock and Basquiat. Last year, however, something was different. In Christie’s most prominent gallery sat a 37 foot long, 67 million year old Tyrannosaurus Rex affectionately named “STAN.” The dinosaur’s namesake was the paleontologist who first found part of the skeleton in South Dakota. Like Salvator Mundi, STAN represented an anomaly in a sale typically reserved for paintings and sculptures. In order to remedy the incongruity between the lot and the auction’s theme, the marketing campaign had to tell a compelling story. One simple explanation is that Stan Sacrison made the initial discovery of the skeleton in the spring of 1987, meaning STAN fits within the 20th Century scope of the sale. That answer, however, is wholly unsatisfactory, so instead I turned to Maddie Smit, my friend, former colleague, and current exhibition designer at Christie’s, for answers.

Maddie served as an exhibition designer on this project and it quickly became clear in our conversation that the small team triumphed with this ambitious feat under a tight timeline, during the pandemic no less. It seems that STAN may have been slated for another auction, but by mid summer 2020 senior leaders announced internally that the king of dinosaurs needed to be mounted in the gallery come October. The team set in motion to create a sense of discovery for visitors. They used dark paint on the walls and high contrast technical lighting to engage the viewer, especially in contrast to the white-washed gallery walls next door. The final design, which was sleek and modern, developed out of a realization STAN stood in an art gallery and not a natural history museum. The team might not have been scientists, but they were experts at displaying art. In that way, they viewed the skeleton’s bones as sculptures. When I asked Maddie why STAN was auctioned in the sale, she referenced Jean-Michel Basquiat, the Brooklyn-born artist who also had a work in the same sale. She explained that Basquiat (who sadly died at 27 of a drug overdose) painted images through an anthropological lens that captured moments in his life. Similarly, STAN represents a moment in time – an age called the Late Cretaceous Period, but more simply and beautifully, a moment in late summer or early fall when a thick layer of leaves fell and fossilized the bones for millions of years. In Maddie's summary, “I never get tired of looking at a Basquiat, and I never get tired of looking at STAN.”   

The case of Salvator Mundi and STAN testify to the power of storytelling to overcome complexity and incongruity. Leonardo’s depiction of Christ chartered new territory in the art market and continues to capture our imagination and our skepticism in the headlines. The king of the dinosaurs sparked child-like wonder among spectators. Even in less compelling cases, marketers have a duty to responsibly share these stories.