Peter Doig became Europe's most expensive living painter in 2007 when his atmospheric painting of a moonlit lagoon, White Canoe, sold for £5.7 million.
The Scotsman broke auction records in 2017 and 2021 respectively. Rosedalea description of a house in a snowstorm, and Overwhelmedand another enigmatic canoe painting sold for the staggering prices of £21 million and nearly £30 million respectively.
The 65-year-old artist estimates that his paintings have made a total of around £380 million in sales since 2007. But he has now revealed that he has only made £230,000 from those sales.
Doig said it was collectors who were profiting off works on the secondary market at “exorbitant prices” and that it was impossible to know who they were because the art trade is so opaque. “It's all very secretive,” he said. observer“Some paintings are sold overseas and cannot be traced.”
He is now calling for greater transparency in the art market, to protect young artists, who are especially vulnerable. Doig believes that, like any other business relationship, galleries have a duty to share information about sales with the artists who created the works. “Galleries should be absolutely transparent in all their transactions. There is a lot of secrecy, especially when the amounts involved are high. When an artist sells a work, they have very few rights.”
Doig said he recently got into a “full-scale argument” with his former gallery after they refused to reveal who had bought his work.
“I didn't want the money,” he says. “I wanted to know where the paintings had gone. They said, 'We can't give you that information.'”
I said, 'Can you at least tell me how much you sold it for?' and they refused to do that either. It's infuriating because the information is being kept top secret.”
He adds: “In the contemporary art world, galleries will secondary sell the work, which I've found happens quite frequently.”
“For example, after you sell a painting, maybe five years later the person who bought it resells it. Usually it's done through a gallery, because that's their deal. The gallery might give you something, but it's not a piece of paper or an invoice like what happens in the real world.
“Outside of auction, it's never clear what price a work will fetch on the secondary market.”
He believes some dealers take advantage of artists: “When you're a young artist, you're more vulnerable and you're very grateful to have your work shown and sold.”
Doig was born in Edinburgh in 1959, grew up in Trinidad and Canada and studied at St Martin's and Chelsea Colleges in London, and now divides his time between the UK and Trinidad, creating evocative compositions ranging from jungles to snow-capped mountains.
After newsletter promotion
He is considered one of the most important painters working today, but he is frustrated that people mistakenly assume that his auction sales reflect the profits he has made from his paintings, when “his behind-the-scenes sales are at least as large and are conducted in great secrecy.”
The secondary market has certainly increased the value of his paintings in the primary market, he says, “but the secondary market is a world of its own, and I will never be able to match or even come close to the prices that occur there.”
The Design and Artists Copyright Society (DACS) Artist Resale Rights The scheme entitles artists and their beneficiaries to payments if the work is resold for more than £1,000 through a gallery, auction house or art dealer, allowing Doig to keep a record of his sales. “But the top price you can get from a sale at DACS is very small.” Works that sell for more than £2 million are paid a maximum royalty of £12,500. “And if someone sells the painting overseas, you don't get that amount.”
When Doig was still a struggling artist, he was nominated for the Whitechapel Artist Prize in 1990 by artist Yuko Shiraishi, whose husband, David Judah, runs a gallery that represents David Hockney's work. Doig won, and it “gave him more attention than he'd ever received before.”
Doig is currently this year's special curator for the David and Yuko Judah Arts Foundation Grant, which will provide £50,000 to artists to help ease financial pressures.
He shortlisted seven candidates, including a former student, Kaori MashioThe Düsseldorf-based Japanese artist's landscape paintings are “very delicate and beautiful,” says his former teacher, Tim Allen's abstract paintings deserve “true appreciation.”
A judging panel, including former Tate curator Andrew Wilson, will decide the winner next week. Annelie Judah Fine Art It will be held in London from September 10th.
