Christie’s announcement that it is redesigning its furniture and works of art sales represents a more wholesale consolidation of a process that has been going on for some years, writes Anne Crane.
You have to trawl some way through back catalogues to find a sale at King Street devoted entirely to clocks, ceramics or silver. For some years now the auction house has been grouping these traditional categories that were once a mainstay of its calendar into mixed-discipline auctions under titles such as Centuries of Style or 500 Years: Decorative Arts Europe.
The latest redefinition attempts to make these changes more coherent and consistent by rolling them out globally in the US and Europe. By grouping sales into three different, better-defined classes at specified times of the year, clients will have a clearer picture of what to expect.