Art Market Watch Sothebys Imp & Mod Does A Triumphant $199.8 Million
Sothebys New York evening sale of Impressionist and modern art on Nov
. 2, 2011, totaled $199.8 million, with 57 of the 70 lots selling, or more than 81 percent.
The art market is alive and kicking, said Sothebys expert Simon Shaw with visible relief. The giddy mood -- it was a long sale -- extended to stentorian auctioneer Tobias Meyer, who said he could feel the market rallying.
The reference was to the near-disastrous sale the night before at Christies, which saw more than 30 lots pass, for a total of $140.7 million. Sothebys $198.8 million was in the middle of the presale estimate, and is up from the firms $170.5 million total in the May sales.
Outside, a noisy picket line of locked-out art handlers and supporters from Occupy Wall Street blew whistles and stadium horns. Inside, the crowd found printed apologies on their chairs, with an earnest wish that the strike would soon be settled.
Despite its triumphs, the auction was tedious to sit through -- failure is more amusing -- and many left long before it ended. Those who departed early missed the sales silliest lot, Marc Chagalls comical painting of a large red rooster, Souvenir of Summer (1965), which sold for $2,098,500.
But back to the top lots. Gustav Klimts serene lakeside landscape, Litzlberg am Attersee (1915), was the auctions first highlight, selling after a painfully slow bidding duel for $40,402,500, well above its presale low estimate of $25 million. The buyer was Zurich dealer David Lachenmann, who would not disclose his client.
The picture was stolen by the Gestapo in World War II and recently restituted by the Salzburg Museum of Modern art to grandson of the original owner. As part of the restitution deal, half the sale proceeds go to the museum for a new wing.
Gustave Caillebottes Le Pont dArgenteuil et la Seine (ca. 1883), a marvelous picture of a railroad bridge that strikingly captures the late-19th-century sense of modernity, was the target of the second long bidding duel -- it can take 10 or even 20 seconds for these phone bidders to make up their minds, an eternity in the salesroom. After creeping ever upwards in $250,000 increments, the picture eventually sold to a phone bidder for $18,002,500, about double the presale low estimate and a new auction record for the artist.
Pablo Picassos LAubade (Serenade, 1967), a raucous late work of a nude suffering the attentions of a hyperactive piper that the anonymous consigner had bought at auction in 1979 for something like $800,000, sold for $23,043,500. New York dealer Helly Nahmad, sitting in the front row, raised the penultimate bid by $200,000, a cut bid, prompting Meyer to quip, ok, because its you, sir, but the lot went to the phone bidder.
The auctions largest sale actually came the day before, as the New York Times reported, when lot 29, a 1959 bronze cast of Henri Matisses famous Nu de Dos, was withdrawn from the auction and sold privately along with casts of its three other states for $120 million. The works are sold by the Burnett Foundation in Fort Worth, a social welfare organization that despaired of having so much capital tied up in artworks.
by: aarenbrowns
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