Christie's sold a middling $331.8m of post-war and contemporary art at its auction in New York last night (10 November) that offered few surprises and a number of disappointments. The sale total includes its buyers’ premium whereas the pre-sale estimate of around $316m did not.
Of the 66 lots on offer on the night, 53 works found buyers (for a sell-through rate of 80%), led by an Andy Warhol silkscreen, Four Marilyns (1962) that sold for $36m (est $40m). The work had previously sold at Phillips in May 2013 for $38m and, like ten other lots, carried an in-house guarantee (along with four that carried third-party ones). It received just one bid and sold to a phone bidder in under a minute. Such was the case too—the sub-minute, single bid, in-house guarantee—with the fourth-highest selling lot of the evening, Louise Bourgeois' monumental Spider (1997), which sold for $28.2m (est $25m-$35m), one of seven artist auction records for the evening.
At other times, Jussi Pylkkanen, the auctioneer and Christie's president, seemed content to slow things down, drawing out bidding, for example, on a record-making work by Lucio Fontana from the collection of Steven Cohen, Concetto spaziale, La fine di Dio (1964), which hammered at $25.9m (est. $25m-$35m).
Pylkkanen also took his time with the first nine lots, which came from the collection of Arthur and Anita Kahn. Six of those were works by Alexander Calder and fierce competition brought the hammer total for all nine to $47m, well over the estimated $12.8m to $19.2m the nine lots were expected to bring. After the sale, Christophe Van de Weghe, who deals in works by Calder, said the pieces were particularly impressive, as was the provenance. "It's a great collection, never been to the market," he said.
Warhol had a weaker night. The artist’s Self-Portrait (Nine Times, 1967) from the Miles and Shirley Fiterman collection was bought-in at $6.5m (est. $8m-$10m). Van de Weghe, who also sells works by Warhol, said the estimate "should have been half of what it was".
At the press conference after the sale, Brett Gorvy, the international head of post-war and contemporary art, downplayed any kind of market correction, saying that collections such as the Kahns' did well. "The market is healthy, it is selective," he said.
But even the performance of some of the collections was patchy. Claes Oldenburg's Clothespin Ten Foot (1974) doubled its estimate, selling for $3.6m and Warhol's Little Electric Chair (1964) made it into the top ten highest-selling lots at $11.6m (est. $6m-8m), both from the Fiterman collection, sold to Allan Hobart of London's Pyms Gallery. Yet Warhol’s Late Four-Foot Flowers (1967, est $8m-$12m), from the same collection, failed to find a buyer. Soon after that, an untitled work by Joan Mitchell (1956) from the Mezzacappa Collection was bought in at $5.5m (est. $6m-$9m).
