Christie’s, New York.
We are off to a strong start to the November sales with the Christie’s Impressionist-Modernist sale on Monday generating a $479.3 million turnover with 88% of the lots finding happy homes. The prize fish of the auction, a late Van Gogh, Laborer dans un Champ sold for $81,312,500 million surpassing its estimate by 31.3 million. Honourable mentions in the Modernist category go to Fernand Leger’s Contraste de Formes at $62 million, and a lovely Rene Magritte of the L’empire des Lumieres series sold for $20,562,500 million.
Next on our agenda, we take in the offerings on the previews floor for the contemporary evening sale, wondering who will make bigger splashes with a Da Vinci thrown in the mix? As much as we are rooting for a reaffirmation of the renaissance master and that glorious rock crystal orb in Salvator Mundi, we are also hedging that we can expect big splashes from Andy Warhol’s Sixty Last Suppers and Twombly’s Untitled from his Bacchus series. The record prices for Warhol and Twombly are $105 million for Silver Car Crash (double disaster) and $70 million for Untitled (New York City), respectively. We yawned passed the $35 million estimate on Rothko’s Saffron, preferring that particular colour in our food, to cast a cool eye over Kerry James Marshall’s Still Life with Wedding Portraits. We’ve spotted Marshall from London to Miami in recent years, so we will be keeping an eye on that $1,500,000 estimate tomorrow, as well as on Lee Krasner’s Shattered Light at $2,500,000, and Currin’s Gold Nude. But the piece that has most stolen our heart is a room filled with mylar fish by Philippe Parreno, at an approachable estimate of $350,000.
Stay tuned for our updates from the auction house floor.
