A Strong Showing for Contemporary
Christie's showed again last night why it is a well-oiled — which is not to say robotic — machine when it comes to selling Post-War and Contemporary art. With a sale estimated at between $242 million and $338 million, the weighty 67-lot sale was imposing. Yet the experts at Christie's stacked the first nine lots so well that six records were set within the first half hour of the sale. Clearly the art market still has juice left in it.
There were 16 records in total in the $325 million sale. Those records included: Lucian Freud's "Ib and Her Husband" for $19.3 million; Thomas Struth's "Pantheon, Rome" at $1.04 million; Yoshitomo Nara's "Princess of Snooze" at $1.49 million; and Rudolph Stingel's untitled work at $1.21 million.
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But the most electric moment of the evening came early on when Richard Prince's "Piney Woods Nurse" far exceeded the previous record price for his work — $2.5 million — to sell for $6.08 million. It was as if collectors were re-asserting the primacy of Mr. Prince over such Chinese upstarts as Zhang Xiaogang, who set a record shortly after with "Bloodlines: Mother and Three Sons" selling for $3.96 million.
The rest of the evening was orderly and remunerative, but many of the evening's most anticipated works sold toward their low estimates. Jeff Koons's "Diamond (Blue)" went for an $11.8 million hammer price — a record, but not as much as anticipated.
Mark Rothko showed strength with "Untitled (Red, Blue, Orange)," which went over the high estimate of $30 million to sell for $34.2million. But "Untitled (Black and Gray)" just missed the low estimate at $10.68 million.
Highlights of the sale included Ed Ruscha's "Burning Gas Station," which set a record for the artist at $6.98 million, and Joan Mitchell's "Atlantic Side," which came in above the high estimate at $5.08 million.
Works by Andy Warhol seemed to slow in the bidding but the artist's portrait of Muhammad Ali, estimated at between $2 million and $3 million, eventually went for $9.22 million. Who knew?
