Setback for a Giacometti at Sotheby’s

This could be a sign. On Tuesday evening, 13 May, at Sotheby's in New York, ‘Grande tête mince (Grande tête de Diego)’, a bronze bust by Alberto Giacometti from 1955, failed to find a buyer. The sculpture had everything going for it: a masterpiece by an auction star, purchased in 1957 by collectors Richard and Florence Weil from the Maeght Gallery, it is also the only one of the six pieces in the series to have been enhanced with paint.

And yet, the bust, representative of the Swiss artist's three-dimensional portraits with their hollow eye sockets and emaciated faces, sharp as razor blades, will return to its owner. In the auction room, no one could meet the asking price set by the Soloviev Foundation, which was hoping for $70 million, a fabulous sum that it planned to donate to charity. The hammer fell at £64.2 million for this large head, which had no reserve price. Not enough for the foundation, which preferred to pass rather than sell, at least in its mind.

No hasty conclusions should be drawn, but this failure brings the ambitions of overly greedy sellers back to harsh reality at a time when the art market is undergoing a significant correction. We are no longer in 2015, when ‘The Man with the Finger’ by the same artist sold for $141.3 million at Christie's, an absolute record for a sculpture that has never been equalled. At the time, the work was offered by New York real estate magnate and collector Sheldon Solow, whose son, Stefan Soloviev, created the foundation that bears his name. The same foundation, therefore, which attempted to sell Diego's portrait on Tuesday evening, 13 May. Times have certainly changed.