BID Sothebys

Christie's top contemporary-art executive is stepping down. Brett Gorvy, the longtime chairman and international head of Christie's postwar and contemporary art, said Wednesday he is leaving the auction house to be a private art adviser.

Mr. Gorvy is a 23-year veteran at Christie's who sat on its board and helped the house dominate the industry for the past decade—a position he bolstered by mounting ever-bigger sales of newer art with ballooning price tags to match. In a realm where billionaire art sellers demand huge profits and wary bidders seek safe bets and bargains, Mr. Gorvy excelled at playing the reassuring conductor, using hushed tones to convince both groups that he alone could accurately pinpoint the market value of a Lucian Freud or an Andy Warhol.

Born in South Africa, Mr. Gorvy moved to London and studied journalism before joining Christie's in 1993. Back then, the art market was still recovering from a recent market crash and contemporary art was deemed speculative compared to older mainstay categories like old masters or impressionism. But as he climbed the ranks, moving to New York in 2000 to become deputy chairman of Christie's Americas, he started keeping a revolving list of collectors who he said could afford to spend $50 million or more on a single work of art—and he set out to persuade each one of them to take a closer look at contemporary art, or pieces created after 1945.

At the outset, most of the collectors on his list were in their 70s and worked for major corporations, he said in an earlier interview. As of last year, his list included 141 names, and most in their 40s and 50s and many were self-made billionaires. At least 26 people on his list were new collectors from Asia.

Mr. Gorvy's knack for cultivating these collectors and helping them push up values for living artists helped Christie's dominate contemporary-art sales for the past decade—besting rivals Sotheby's and Phillips. In 2004, one of his sales broke the $100 million barrier for the first time. Last year, he helped organize a mixed-category sale of older and newer art that totaled $706 million, the biggest auction to date.

In that 2015 sale, he fielded the nearly $180 million winning bid for a Pablo Picasso, 1955's "Women of Algiers (Version O)." Two years before that, he was on the phone with casino magnate Elaine Wynn when she outbid several rivals to win a $142.4 million Francis Bacon from 1969, "Three Studies of Lucian Freud."

Mr. Gorvy couldn't immediately be reached for comment.

His move is likely to cause a stir in the clubby art world, but it follows a string of high-profile departures of auction executives in the past year as the world's chief houses grapple with a contracting art market. Values peaked in spring 2015 when Mr. Gorvy fielded that nearly $180 million Picasso bid, but sales and art values have fallen off gradually ever since. Dealers say collectors eyeing broader economic uncertainties have grown wary, preferring to hang onto their prized pieces rather than risk putting them up at auction.

Last year, Christie's sales of contemporary art fell 20% to $2.2 billion, a surprising-at-the-time turnabout for a house that had staked its reputation on its ability to woo new global collectors to bid up works by living artists. During the first half of this year, contemporary art sales at Christie's took another hit as its $788 million in auction sales for the period represented a 45% drop from the year before.

Corrections & Amplifications: Brett Gorvy joined Christie's in 1993. An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated 1994. (December 7, 2016)

Write to Kelly Crow at kelly.crow@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

December 07, 2016 10:25 ET (15:25 GMT)

Sothebys (NYSE:BID)
Historical Stock Chart
From Mar 2024 to Apr 2024

Sothebys (NYSE:BID)
Historical Stock Chart
From Apr 2023 to Apr 2024