Another Stellar Sale at Christie’s

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The New York Sun

Last night’s sale of contemporary and postwar art at Christie’s confirmed the art market is roaring as it hasn’t done for more than a decade. The house sold 63 lots, raking in $92.5 million and setting 10 new records for works by individual artists sold at auction. And only four lots failed to sell.


As at the Sotheby’s sale Tuesday night, money seemed not to matter. Last night buyers did not seem turned off by prices that had no historical precedent. Twenty-six lots sold for more than $1 million dollars – a statistic more commonly associated with Impressionist and Modern art sales. “I don’t think any of us had any idea it was going to do so well,” said auctioneer Christopher Burge after the sale.


The night seems to mark the high point of a week of free spending. Buyers gobbled up $12.5 million in contemporary photography at Phillips de Pury & Co. on Monday. Over the next two days, they dropped $121 million at Sotheby’s day and night sale. But though at the outset of the week many in the trade suggested Sotheby’s had the stronger sale, Christie’s was deeper, and ultimately seemed to outperform the competition.


Some claimed not to be surprised. “People love to buy at auction and it’s become quite a spectacle,” said dealer Andrew Fabricant of Richard Gray Gallery. “People are focused on the new and the hip. Jasper Johns and Richard Prince. This is the stuff that is driving the bus.” After the sale, where he bought an early Jeff Koons for $2.6 million and a Jasper Johns for $3.3 million, he explained that “It was all expected.” Then, turned out in an elegant pinstripe suit, he headed for the door.


The artists buyers were most interested in were not epochal names like Rothko and De Kooning. Records were set for works sold at auction by Jim Hodges, Marlene Dumas, Dan Flavin, Carl Andre, Lee Bontecou, Robert Motherwell, John Currin, Maurizio Cattelan, and Joseph Kosuth. But many others saw bidding for their works shoot up above the magical $1 million mark.


The evening’s top lot was Andy Warhol’s “Mustard Riot Race,” bought by Cologne dealer Rafael Jablonka, who said he bought it for his own collection. Mr. Jablonka paid $15.1 million (the work was expected to sell for around $15 million). While Warhol was famously apolitical, in the early 1960s he took a dark turn with paintings of gangster funerals, suicides, and electric chairs. “Mustard Riot Race” shows images of a black civil rights protester being attacked by a police dog. Warhol applied screen-printed images from a Life Magazine story to two panels, painted in a jarring Dijon yellow. Two related works, “Pink Race Riot” and “Mauve Race Riot,” hang in the Cologne Museum and Switzerland’s Daros Collection, respectively.


The artist gave a typically vague rationale for selecting the source material. “It was just something that caught my eye,” he said, according to Christie’s catalog. Christie’s was also touting a collection of six works from Chicago collectors Dorie and Paul Sternberg, which in the end performed solidly. The Sternbergs began buying in the 1960s, and works from their collection appeared to be exactly what buyers were looking for last night.


One of the finest was a 1946 mobile by Alexander Calder, “Baby Flat Top,” which smashed a $1.5-2 million estimate, selling for $4.7 million to Robert Mnuchin of C & M Arts. The piece, actually constructed from five separate mobiles, was given its title after the nickname for World War II Navy escort carriers. The Sternbergs bought the Calder from dealer Eugene Thaw in 1973.


Two bidders in the room jumped on the Sternberg’s classic 1971 Cy Twombly “Untitled (Rome),” estimated at $5-7 million, which sold for $5.4 million – one of few works not to blast through their high estimates. Nonetheless, Mr. Twombly’s work has soared in price since the Sternbergs bought the piece from a dealer in 1987: It probably cost them around $300,000-$350,000, according to a Christie’s expert.


Last night also proved that the Minimalist market is indeed on the move. Christie’s had several works which prompted serious interest from potential buyers. Donald Judd’s 1968 glowing pink Plexiglas box “Untitled (DSS 155)” was given an aggressive $800,000-$1.2 million estimate. (Another version of the box, in amber, belongs to the Whitney Museum.) It sold for $2.6 million to a phone bidder.


It also looks like art-world phenomenon Maurizio Cattelan is still shaking things up. Last night two Cattelans sold strongly, though neither work was especially easy for a collector to take home. The man whose suspended taxidermy horse sold at Sotheby’s for $2 million last spring now hit the block with his 2000 “Not Afraid to Love” – essentially a life-sized elephant, made from stryrene, resin, paint, and fabric, with a sheet tossed over it.


The piece originally had been bought from Cattelan’s dealer, Marian Goodman, for a few hundred thousand. Now, less than five years later, it shot past its $700,000-$900,000 estimate in a lengthy bidding battle between a phone bidder and Pace Wildenstein dealer Marc Glimcher. The phone bidder prevailed, paying $2.75 million and establishing a record for a work by the artist sold at auction.


The other Cattelan was a self-portrait of the artist, made in 2001 for a show at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Holland. The artists dug a hole in the floor of the museum and stuck a wax version of himself there. The work sold for $2 million, above its estimate of $700,000-$900,000 – indicating that plenty of bidders would be willing to puncture their floors to accommodate a Cattelan.


The New York Sun

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