The elongated nose and modernist lines of the Schuster Master Cycladic Idol, circa 2400 B.C., resonate in Amedeo Modigliani’s portrait of Paulette Jourdain, circa 1919. Photo: From left: courtesy of Phoenix Ancient Art; courtesy of Sotheby’sAntiquities has long been a sleepy segment of the art market, but it’s finally waking up. Strong interest is coming from savvy collectors of modern and contemporary art who have noticed that ancient art often displays remarkably well alongside great 20th century works, and that museum-quality pieces thousands of years old can be acquired for a fraction of what it costs to purchase modern works.Interior designer Stephen Sills is one such collector. He decorated his minimalist Manhattan apartment with a combination of Hellenistic art and modern works by Robert Rauschenberg, Richard Serra, and Agnes Martin. “They go beautifully together,” Sills explains. “Ancient artworks look great in decorative environments because they have such clean, modern lines…a great nod to the history of the world in art.”
.Helping to drive the interest of collectors like Sills are recent exhibitions that have paired ancient art with 20th century masterpieces. The “Mnemosyne: de Chirico and Antiquity” exhibition, which ran from November 2015 through January 2016 at the Helly Nahmad Gallery in New York, displayed Giorgio de Chirico’s surrealist 20th century works together with Greek and Roman antiquities. Ancient statues, mosaics, bronze armor, and Greek vases stood cheek by jowl with the Italian artist’s bold landscapes of deserted valleys dotted with classical ruins, portraits of Greek gods, and gladiators clad in armor.“The Nahmad exhibition aimed to cultivate an environment in which antiquities are appreciated in a modern context,” says Hicham Aboutaam, co-founder of Phoenix Ancient Art, which has galleries in New York and Geneva. The successful show attracted Dasha Zhukova, the art collector and founder of the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow; fashion designer Valentino Garavani; and philanthropists Michael Steinhardt and Leonard Stern. Similarly, a show a few years earlier at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles examined how four artists—Picasso, de Chirico, Léger, and Picabia—transformed the artistic legacy of antiquity. Today’s modern collectors are particularly drawn to Cycladic art, works that primarily originated in the third millennium B.C. on the beautiful Cyclades islands sprinkled between Greece and Turkey. These ancient works have a stripped-down feel to their stone contours. “When the pieces are abstracted and have clean, more-modernist lines, the contemporary or modern art collectors are more drawn to them,” says Alexandra Olsman, a specialist in the Antiquities Department at Christie’s.Consider the Cycladic marble female figure, circa 2700 B.C. to 2600 B.C., that was sold by Christie’s for $87,500 in December. The statue’s oval face and elongated, well-centered nose are remarkably similar to the angular faces found in Amedeo Modigliani’s best works. “That is what crossover buyers tend to really go for,” Olsman explains. “They have the same simple shapes aesthetically.” The Wall Street Journal noted that Modigliani’s Reclining Nude, painted in 1917-18, has a “heart-shaped face [that] reveals Modigliani’s fondness for Cycladic figures from antiquity.” The painting was sold in November to a Chinese billionaire for $170.4 million, while the Modigliani portrait Paulette Jourdain, also bearing a Cycladic facial structure, sold the same month for $42.8 million at Sotheby’s A. Alfred Taubman sale. (All auction figures quoted in this article include the buyer’s premium.)Now compare those prices with the works that inspired them. The Christie’s New York antiquities auction in December included several Cycladic marble pieces, including the 10-inch-tall female figure mentioned earlier. It sold for $87,500, above its presale estimate of $50,000 to $70,000. Another Cycladic marble, a six-inch female figure circa 2500 B.C. to 2400 B.C. with a lyre-shaped head and a long triangular nose, sold for $52,500, well above its presale estimate of $25,000 to $35,000. Much went for far less. A five-inch Anatolian marble idol from 2700 B.C. to 2100 B.C. sold for $5,000; two Bactrian stone weights, circa third millennium B.C., sold for $8,750; and a Bactrian stone ritual object sold for a bargain $10,000.The highest price to date for a Cycladic piece sold at auction was the Schuster Master Cycladic Idol. In December 2010, it sold for $16.9 million; three years earlier, Phoenix Ancient Art sold the same piece to a private collector for $6.2 million. But the marble idol was an outlier. Generally, the price for a minor work by a top modern or contemporary artist is higher than all of the pieces combined sold in an antiquities auction.The recorded sales for Christie’s entire antiquities auction held each December in New York were $4.4 million, $7.5 million, and $4 million, respectively, in 2013, 2014, and 2015. One issue is the lack of inventory; there were only 196 lots in the December 2015 sale.The “Mnemosyne: de Chirico and Antiquity” show at New York City’s Helly Nahmad Gallery drew far-flung collectors and demonstrated how well modern and ancient art can stand together in a stylish home. Attendees included philanthropists Leonard Stern and Michael Steinhardt, and the Russian contemporary collector Dasha Zhukova. Photo: Courtesy of Helly Nahmad GalleryMax Bernheimer, the international head of antiquities at Christie’s, says that while there’s a growing demand for antiquities, the “difficulty for us is finding enough material for our four sales a year. The higher the quality, the higher the demand from buyers who are trophy hunters.” According to art-market strategy associate Jonathan Yee at Artnet, in 2011 there were 2,417 antiquities lots sold at auction totaling $115.8 million; in 2015, the 1,150 lots fetched $41.7 million.The tightening supply and relatively low sales figures suggest to us there’s still plenty of room for upside price movement for ancient art. In fact, the nonsensical value gap between 20th century art—hammering down $6.6 billion in 2015—and ancient art—fetching 0.64% of that amount—is still so extreme that some contemporary artists are buying antiquities and incorporating these ancient relics in their own works.Vietnamese-born Danish artist Danh Vo created Lick Me Lick Me in 2015. In that work, he sliced a second-century marble torso of Apollo in half and displayed it in a wooden Carnation milk crate. Francesco Vezzoli, a contemporary Italian artist, is known for repainting ancient Roman busts in the original manner, and does so by collaborating with archaeologists, conservators, and polychrome specialists. Five of these busts were displayed in 2015 at New York’s MoMA PS1, and this melding of modern and ancient art techniques struck a chord with the public. Vezzoli told New York Magazine’s admiring art critic Carl Swanson that when he buys the ancient sculptures at auction, the prices are “always much lower than one would expect” and sell for more after he has repainted them.So, how do you develop an eye capable of spotting quality antiquities? First-time collectors tend to buy indiscriminately. Allen Shaheen, 53, a Virginia Beach, Va., collector of antiquities, Art Deco, and contemporary works, bought everything that came his way when he first became interested in antiquities five years ago. “But,” he says, “the more sophisticated I got, the more I realized that I should only buy the best that I could afford.” Shaheen now has a dozen or so works, and displays his modern and ancient collections together. Most of his acquisitions were purchased for $50,000 to $300,000, and include a complete Egyptian sistrum, or rattle, in bronze and an Etruscan bronze warrior. Among his Art Deco and contemporary works are those by Amedeo Gennarelli, Madeline Denaro, and Willy Bo Richardson.The biggest hurdle is ensuring that you purchase antiquities with bulletproof provenance. Richard Hodges, the renowned archaeologist and president of the American University of Rome, advises that buyers obtain an ironclad guarantee from the seller proving the legality of the work they own. “Be sure the piece has a provenance with documentation of ownership that dates before 1970,” he says.If you do buy stolen antiquities, know that you are going to eat the loss. The Unesco Convention of 1970 gives member countries the right to recover stolen or illegally exported antiquities from other member countries, including the U.S., which has signed over a dozen related bilateral agreements. But there are some exceptions to the rule in which a post-1970 provenance might be acceptable.