The numbers for 2012 compiled by the Australian Art Sales Digest for 2012 suggest the company was the only auction house of the leading five to lift sales by any serious margin in 2012.
With the exception of Lawson-Menzies which achieved only a modest gain, all other major auction houses and all categories of art surveyed suffered declines in turnover during the year.
In a year in which total market turnover fell 4.2 per cent from $99.91 to $95.72 million Sotheby's lifted its sales by $4.73 million to $21 million.
The lift was achieved while the chairman of Sotheby's Australia, Geoffrey Smith was fighting a fierce battle on another front in the courtroom to settle a property dispute with his former partner, and could well have had his eyes on other things.
If the figures supplied by the auction houses and compiled by Australian Art Sales Digest alone are anything to go by, Smith and his work associates kept their eyes on the ball for Sotheby's increased both the number of works sold from 280 to 337 and the average sale value of those works from $58,118 to $62,320.
Luck and timing often have a big bearing on the consignments received by auction houses. So can decisions on what to sell for a client as a private treaty (an increasing part of business in hard times) exercise or at auction.
There is also the matter of the power of the Sotheby's brand. While its web site emphasises the franchise's independence from Sotheby's International, there is a Sotheby's International tradition of private treaty dealings in Australia and Smith has a commercial gallery association which might also have led him there instead.
The Sotheby's local brand or franchise had come to Smith and his fellow shareholders in Sotheby's Australia by way of its purchase from auctioneer Tim Goodman one year after he in turn had bought it from Sotheby's International.
Both years could have been periods of changing loyalties and turmoil arising from staff exits.
The franchise sold three of the six works which made over $1 million in 2012 and edged up the average value of the works it sold in carefully constructed sales to a number of well targeted buyers.
Deutscher and Hackett, often considered the likely number two in the market, stayed at number three with sales of $13.86 million down from $14.42 previously.
D+H sold more works than Sotheby's: 476 at an average price of $29,109 against 491 at an average price of $29,376 in 2011.
Its total auction sales declined slightly, with total sales falling from $14.42 million to $13.85 million, although it sold the year's most expensive painting, Arthur Streeton's The Settler's Hut for $2.52 million.
As disenchantment with art as an investment set in over the regulations governing the tax treatment of art in self administered superannuation funds, the gross value of works sold at auction fell from $99.91 million to $95.22 million or 4.9 per cent.
The Australian resale royalty also came into force with its 5 per cent impost a liability down the track after the first sale had been consummated.
The decline took the total way below the $175.6 million record turnover of 2007 and followed a decline of $3.35 million in 2011.
The art market was clobbered by a third whammy – diminishing retail confidence. Buyers paid off loans and limited their discretionary spending particularly on luxury goods.
It appeared to matter not that the land of the golden wattle was basking in economic sunshine.
Australians who were travelling overseas in vast numbers with a dollar that had assumed a value unknown for years must have seen the flip side of what had been happening globally – recession and financial collapse - could mean for Australia..
They reduced their purchases at auction for Australian non-indigenous art, Aboriginal art and, oddly, overseas art which had become much cheaper.
Their enthusiasm might have been limited by the lack of a good spread of work to tempt them.
The malaise was disguised by more disciplined approach by auction houses to reserves and a greater selectivity as to what they offered in what had become very much a buyers' market.
There is anecdotally a lot of work out that which vendors want to offload, particularly Aboriginal art, which the auction houses just will not take.
The decline was on a reduced number of works sold from 16,166 in 2011 to 15,877 in 2012 with the clearance rate down from 67 per cent to 65 per cent.
The auction house registering the biggest fall in turnover was the Menzies Art Brands whose sales of $29.9 million were $5.98 million less than the previous year.
This was more than the entire market fall of $4.69 million. With normally the most repetitive stock on the market, Menzies vendors could have been hardest hit by the new artists' resale royalty.
When combined with the $6.39 million result achieved by the affiliated Lawson-Menzies the Menzies group's reported results were still way out in front of all the other auction houses, although this mid-tier operator added only $491,000 to its total compared with the previous year.
In 2012 Lawson-Menzies sold 1023 works at an average price of $6250 against 1002 works at $5891 each in the previous year, and it is conceivable some lower priced pictures which might previously have been offered by the more up-market division of the group, were left with Lawson-Menzies.
This lower end of the market is said to be doing relatively well achieving better audience participation through the commitment of small time collectors who have to watch their money.
Sotheby's managed to leave the heavily resourced and nominal rival Bonhams Australia's behind with the local branch of the London head-quartered global brand's art auction turnover down from $5.90 million in 2011 to $5.43 million this year.
This was just ahead of local operator Mossgreen, whose art auction turnover at $4.75 million in 2012 was down from the $5.75 million achieved in 2011.
Mossgreen's strategy of developing as a boutique auction house with strong emphasis on smaller single owner sales still appeared to be a winner.
At Mossgreen sales, the crowds turned up and clearances were usually respectable and prices comfortably ahead of estimates. This year there was simply no sale to match last year's $4.1 million dispersal of the collection of art dealer, bureaucrat and philanthropist Ann Lewis.
It was near impossible to squeeze through the door of Tim Olsen Gallery on November 18 when Mossgreen sold the collection of the late Leslie Walford the Double Bay, Sydney interior decorator, whose career had spanned more than half a century.
But the total was only $536,995 of which art accounted for about one-fifth of the total.
In the Australian market, there were six paintings that sold for $1 million or more during 2012, compared with 10 in the previous year.
That Streeton was top of the pile might also be instructive. At the beginning of the year at least, the market wanted traditional art.
Whispering in the Wattle Boughs by Fredrick McCubbin was sold by Sotheby's for $1.2 million in May.
Timing may have been out for Bonhams, with a swag of expensive Impressionist paintings in its November sale, to participate in any swing to traditionals as market conditions became more frigid as spring advanced.
Its average price per work sold of fell from $35,540 for each of the 166 works sold in 2011 to $23,643 for the 230 works in 2012.
Although more works were sold, Bonhams' fine art auction turnover fell from $6 million to $5.4 million.
This was despite traditional art seeming so much safer than moderns and contemporaries in stringent times, when fakery and skulduggery was being alleged in court on one major modern art work after another.
In the previous year eight of the works sold for $1 million plus were moderns. This year two of the six were Australian Impressionist.
There were no public sector deals of the calibre of the previous two years when a $7 million plus purchase of colonial material by Sydney's Mitchell Library appeared to eventuate. But these were private treaty sales not included in the Australian Art Sales Digest figures, and largely scored by the local representative of Christie's which does not auction in Australia.
Australian collectors failed to emerge as big buyers on international markets as they had during the share boom of the 1980s. Overseas art sold at Australian auctions was marginally lower at $5.799 million against $8.138 million previously when Menzies Art Group sold a Rodin boosting the overseas sales total markedly.
Usually, as with some of the modern linocuts and Japanese prints that turned up during the year, the lots appear headed in the opposite direction, bought to arbitrage overseas or by the overseas trade.
Melbourne dealer Roger McIlroy's reported purchase of a Brancusi sculpture for $10 million during the year raised hopes that Australians were finally again making an impression on the overseas market.
McIlroy, however, has overseas as well as local buyers and is giving nothing away regarding his buyers.
Although Aboriginal artists were the primary targets for assistance under the resale royalty scheme, the five year consecutive annual decline in spending in this market appeared to level off, with $8.14 million worth sold against $8.16 million previously, but still less than one third of $26.45 million achieved at the peak of the market in 2007.
