If there is one thing we have learned this year it’s that the collector class still has money to spend, but will only spend it on choicest, most fresh-to-market works. Christie’s 20th century evening sale on Tuesday, which totaled $486 million with a sell through rate of 92 percent by value and 83 percent by lot, certainly proved that maxim true.
The evening opened with 19 lots from the collection of designer and philanthropist Mica Ertegun, which alone brought in $184 million. And while there were moments of drama throughout the sale, often those moments were like a premier league match slogged down by video-assisted referees, plagued by momentum-killing flukes like a dropped call or having to convert currency on the fly.
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(All figures reported here include buyer’s premium, unless noted otherwise noted.)
Like last night’s modern art sale at Sotheby’s, which also included a single owner estate sale—in that case, the collection of beauty industry titan Sydell Miller—Christie’s 20th century sale was uneven and slightly erratic, with its fair share of bidding wars and auction records but also an disappointing amount of bid-squeezing and awkward silences. More than 40 percent of the lots hammered at or below their low estimate and 12 lots failed to sell, four of which came in the last six lots of the sale. By that time, most of the people who came to watch had cleared the sales floor for the more inviting environs of their idling black cars or their reserved table at Mr. Chow.
“All this is really about desire,” art advisor Megan Fox Kelly told ARTnews ahead of the marquee sales week. Advisors, she said, try to be rational, provide information, statistics, background, and comparable. “But really it’s all about their desire. I think that’s what we’re going to see this week. People aren’t sitting on their hands right now. There’s confidence. But really it comes down to just a few things, quality of the object, provenance, and desire.”
There were highlights, of course, and that’s where the desire came in. The high watermark was the sale of Rene Magritte’s L’empire des lumières(1954) which brough in almost exactly a quarter of the evening’s total, $121 million, a world record for the artist at auction. The bidding, which bounced around the sales floor and both phone banks before ultimately being won by a collector on the phone with Alex Rotter, the chairman of 20th and 21st century art, lasted a full eleven minutes. You have to hand it to Christie’s for the embrace of spectacle. When auctioneer Adrian Meyer announced the work was open for bidding at $75 million, well below its $95 million estimate, the lights in the room went black. Then suddenly the walls of the sales floor were illuminated with a deep blue, much to the delight of the audience who “ooohd” and “aaahd” like they were at a magic show in the 1920s.
For the last year or so, Magritte has been the art world equivalent of Taylor Swift tickets. There seem to be plenty of popping up, but the price is high, and they are all desirable. Four of the top ten lots from the sale were by the whimsical Belgian surrealist, one of which happened to be another L’empire des lumières, though this example, which was from 1956, was smaller both in size and in price. It sold for $18.8 million against an estimate of $6 million to $8 million. Like many of the lots during the sale, the mini-Lumières went to a buyer on the phone with Christie’s deputy chairman, Asia Pacific, Xin Li-Cohen, hopefully signaling a reactivated Asian market. After this evening she deserves a shoulder massage after having had her arm up, either bidding or covering her mouth as she spoke to a collector, for what seemed like more than half the lots in the sale.
Ed Ruscha’s absolutely stunning 1964 Standard Station, Ten-Cent Western Being Torn in Half, which also received the dramatic light show treatment, this time in a sci-fi-ish red, held the number two slot on the evening’s top ten list, bringing in more than $68 million on an estimate of around $50 million. (That was a new auction record for the artist.)
Works by Alberto Giacometti, Joan Mitchell, David Hockney, and Willem de Kooning rounded out the top seller list. It’s notable that the two Mitchells, City Landscape and Untitled (both from 1955), hammered at below the low estimate while also counting among the most expensive works sold. Auction math is a funny thing.
Also notable are the works that were passed on, which included marquee names like Jasper Johns, Henri Rousseau, Georgia O’Keeffe, Wayne Thiebaud, and Gustave Caillebotte. Given the political environment during what I like to call the auction houses’ harvest season, it’s no surprise that there were some subpar works in the mix, along with the museum-worthy Magrittes and the Ruscha.
“Both sales were solid, while perhaps uneven in quality,” art advisor Mary Hoeveler told ARTnews after the sale, referencing Sotheby’s Monday night sale on Monday night and Tuesday’s at Christie’s. “Christie’s kept the estimates low to not only encourage bidding, but to see where the market is. There is steam behind the market again, and once people see that, more and better works will show up. Next season the consignments will start to flow again.”
At a press conference after the sale, Rotter said that Christie’s was operating under the “masterpiece approach” for this sale.
“In a market that is not so easy to maneuver, we thought that if we present the greatest works we can get, the Magritte, the Ruscha, these are the best examples. Now, there were things that didn’t sell. There were casualties. But I’m not worried about it,” he said. “The works that we put all the emphasis behind really proved us right. They had multiple bidders and showed that a market based on individual taste is on the rise.”