Consignments from two major collections accounted for nearly half of Sotheby’s highest ever total for a contemporary art auction in London yesterday, 1 July. The house made £130.4m, short of its estimate of £142.2 to £202.6m, but surpassing Christie’s, which is traditionally the market leader in London when it comes to contemporary art. Christie’s record for a sale of post-war and contemporary art has stood at £132.8m since June 2012.
At Sotheby’s, three works from the collection of the Belgian patron Jacques Casier and his wife made £30.3m. Two self-portraits by Francis Bacon, acquired by the Casiers from Marlborough gallery shortly after they were painted in 1975 and 1980, sold for a combined £30m. Both were estimated to sell for between £10m and £15m.
A second collection of works depicting dollar bills, consigned by an unidentified collector, made a combined £34.3m. Eight of the ten works offered sold, including Andy Warhol’s first dollar painting, a rare hand-painted example from 1962, which went for £20.9m (est £13m-£18m). The work was one of three in the sale of 58 lots to be secured with an irrevocable bid; Sotheby’s guaranteed one further lot.
Despite a robust sell-through rate of 84.5% by lot, Sotheby’s total was marred by its failure to find a buyer for its top lot—Bacon’s Study for a Pope I from 1961 (est £25m-£35m).
“The sale started very strong, but the Bacon slowed it a little. We have become so used to these numbers that when expectations aren’t met, it feels a little flat. But overall it was a reassuring result,” said the Austrian gallerist Thaddaeus Ropac as he left the saleroom.
Private collections bolster Christie’s sales At Christie’s on 30 June, two collections also bolstered the results. The house made £95.6m in total (est £82.3m-£117.1m), with 87% sold by lot. Of the 76 lots offered, ten were guaranteed by Christie’s and five were backed by third parties.
Ten works from the collection of Lord Anthony and Lady Evelyn Jacobs made a total of £7m, surpassing their upper estimate of £5.8m. A striped canvas by Morris Louis, Number 36 (1962), sold for £1.5m, more than doubling its high pre-sale estimate of £700,000; an early pin-up sketch by Richard Hamilton also went for twice its high estimate, selling for £242,500.
Four works by former Young British Artists consigned by the Tasmanian collector and professional gambler David Walsh fetched £4.6m against an estimate of £3m to £4m. Two works made records for the artists. Chris Ofili’s Virgin Mary (1996), which was shown in the milestone Sensation show in London in 1997, went for £2.9m (est £1.4m-£1.8m). Great Deeds Against the Dead (1994), a three-dimensional recreation of a Goya etching by Jake and Dinos Chapman, sold to the artists’ dealer, Jay Jopling, for £422,500 (est £400,000-£600,000).
The surprise of the night, however, came when four out of five paintings by Gerhard Richter failed to sell. Brett Gorvy, the international head of post-war and contemporary art at Christie’s, said the sombre works offered were the opposite of the “brightly coloured domestic-style paintings” that new collectors tend to go for.
Overall, contemporary works with estimates in the low hundreds of thousands did well. Just under 40% of lots sold for less than £500,000. “We saw high profile prices in New York. Then in Basel, most works sold for around £500,000. Very few paintings sold for more than £5m. Our results are indicative of where the market is, but they are also indicative of where we are after a six-month season,” Gorvy said.
Meanwhile, at Phillips on 29 June, the house doubled last year’s total, making £18.2m (est £17.2m-£26.1m). With 50 lots (84% of which sold), it was the biggest sale the auction house has staged to date. Ed Dolman, Phillips’s chairman and chief executive, described the result as an “important progression” in an “incredibly competitive” market.
