Giacometti’s ‘L’Homme qui marche 1’, which fetched £65,001,250 on Wednesday, is the most expensive work ever sold at auction

The stupendous price of £65m fetched by Giacometti’s “L’Homme qui marche 1” (1961) at Sotheby’s on Wednesday was seen by dealers leaving the sale as signalling a dramatic turnaround in the fortunes of the art market. “The money was there, but nothing was available to buy, so the moment good things came back for sale they were going to perform incredibly well,” said Richard Nagy, who described the whole sale as evidence of “pent-up spending”.

Also cheering dealers at Sotheby’s, and at Christie’s the previous night, was the number of bidders. At least 10 prospective buyers wanted the Giacometti, with five vying over the £20m level. At Christie’s, at least six bidders went after the top lot, Picasso’s 1963 “Tête de femme (Jacqueline)” which vaulted over its £3m-£4m estimate to make £8.1m (estimates don’t include commission; final prices do). And seven bidders wanted “Badende”, a 1920s painting by Otto Mueller of two naked women playing in sun-dappled water. It sold for £2.1m, well over its estimate of £500,000-£700,000.

The sales also marked a return of Russian buying: the Mueller went to a Russian on the telephone, while a member of Christie’s Russian department made the winning bid for an unidentified collector on Goncharova’s colourful “Espagnole” (c1916) for £6.4m, a record for the artist.

Next week contemporary art will come under the hammer in London. Last year volumes were well down, and the three auction houses were only able to muster an anaemic £32.8m for six sales, with the evening sales at Sotheby’s and Christie’s offering just 27 and 22 lots respectively. This year, while consignments have by no means returned to boom levels, volumes are up, with more than £116m worth of contemporary art going on the block over five days.

Christie’s sale on Tuesday is targeting £38.3m for 52 lots and includes Peter Doig’s 1993 “Concrete Cabin West Side”, estimated at £2m-£3m. But the following night sees the more valuable sale, with Sotheby’s expecting £56.2m for 80 lots, 49 of which come from German collectors Gerhard and Anna Lenz. They amassed a huge group of 1950s and 1960s work by the Zero group and are now selling a small part. Sotheby’s sale also features five Lucian Freud works from another European collection, including his 1978 “Self-portrait with a Black Eye”, estimated at £3m-£4m. Phillips winds up the part one sales on Friday evening with 43 lots that, it hopes, will make £7m.

Would you buy high-priced “art” at auction on a cruise ship? Maybe not, but many people do, and are not always happy with the results. For the cruise companies, these auctions can be a nice little earner, as they rake off up to 40 per cent of the sale price in commission. But onboard auctions have been accused of selling overpriced and even fake prints – billed as “investment art” – to a captive and not always savvy audience of tourists.

‘Self-portrait with a Black Eye’ by Lucian Freud, estimated at £3m-£4m

One gallery, the Michigan-based Park West, which sells some 300,000 artworks a year for a reported turnover of about $450m, has been embroiled in a series of lawsuits over the past two years. Last month six amended complaints were filed in Washington against the gallery; one dissatisfied client claimed in court papers that the gallery was selling “phony and materially overvalued art with worthless appraisals to unsuspecting victims”, citing works by Dalí, Picasso and Rembrandt.

Separately, lawyer Don Payton, who represents other buyers, is preparing to file another complaint against Park West on behalf of 10 plaintiffs in Michigan and thinks there may be more. “I’m getting three or four e-mails or calls about the gallery each week,” he says.

Rodger Young, lead lawyer for Park West, strongly denies all the accusations against his client, saying that the gallery employs a number of experts, including the former head of the art fraud section of the FBI. Park West is countersuing former clients, as well as a website that published complaints, for slander and defamation, in a case being heard in front of a federal court next month.

This year’s Hong Kong art fair, ART HK10 (May 27-30), will be the largest yet, and has attracted many of the big names in the gallery world. The final line-up has just been released and boasts 53 newcomers, bringing the total to 145, well up on last year’s 116. Among the big-hitters dipping their toes in Hong Kong harbour waters this time are Hauser & Wirth, Lehmann Maupin, Pace Beijing, Sperone Westwater and Arndt. The strengthening fair reflects a widely held belief that Hong Kong is the pre-eminent hub for selling art in Asia, bolstered by its tax-free status, proximity to the Chinese mainland and still-strong economy.

A major row has been defused in Spain over Arco, Madrid’s leading contemporary art fair, which opens on February 17. The selection committee fell out with the fair organiser, Ifema, accusing it of overriding the committee’s decisions and including galleries the committee had rejected. At one point, according to The Art Newspaper, more than 70 galleries were threatening to boycott Arco. While things have now been patched up, London’s Anthony Reynolds has pulled out of the committee and will not be doing the fair; he refused to comment to the FT. But selection committee member Angel Samblancat of Galería Polígrafa says: “Major American collectors are no longer coming to Arco, because they already have Miami Basel; this row is giving the fair a lamentable image and other foreign exhibitors are sure to desert Arco too.” The spat reflects Arco’s weakening position in the Spanish art market. Its main buyers were institutional, but, with the recession, these have scaled back their acquisitions and Arco is not attracting enough private collectors to make up for their absence.

Georgina Adam is editor-at-large of The Art Newspaper