The New York evening auctions of Modern and contemporary art, ran without a gala event for the hall of audience, but managed to Sotheby’s, the suspenseful staging of the theatre of a Live auction surprisingly convincing. Oliver Barker, the auctioneer, took about eight screens of the commandments from the Internet and from specialists on phones in London, New York and Hong Kong. Sotheby’s was with 69 out of a total of 74 Lots on offer 363,2 million dollars, close to the upper expectation of 368,4 million; 93 percent of the Lots have been conveyed. For Centerless, Francis bacon’s monumental “Triptych Inspired by the Oresteia of Aeschylus”, came from China, with 73.1 million dollars, the highest Online bid ever. A collector on the phone by Grégoire Billault, but it was the with a $ 74 million.
The evening began with eight of the ten works from the estate of the 2019 deceased collector Ginny Williams, which grossed $ 73.2 million. They were all guarantees, more than half of them by external guarantors. Helen Frank Thaler abstract – expressionist “Royal Fireworks” with 6.7 million dollars (estimate 2/3 million), a record. Well a hand full of bidders competed for two monumental Bronze-eyes of Louise Bourgeois “Eye Benches”, which reached 2.75 million (800 000/1. 2 million). Joan Mitchell’s “Straw” rose to 7.5 million dollars (5/7 million) by an Online bidder.
The contemporaries of the evening began with a Bietgefecht to a painting of the canadian self-taught Matthew Wong. The delivery of his red hung dotted landscape, “The Realm of Appearances” is not without a certain cynicism, because Wong took in the previous autumn at the age of 35 years to life, a year after his acclaimed first solo exhibition at the gallery, Karma in New York. The image increased to $ 1.5 million. Basquiat’s “Untitled (Head)” came to EUR 13.1 million (9/12 million), a record price for Basquiat on paper, by an Online bid. Clyfford Stills “PH-144 (1947 – Y-No. 1)” was added to the lower estimate of 25 million. Also “Night Sky #7” by the American artist Vija Celmins scored a record with 5,55 million dollars (6/8 million).
The Centerless in impressionism and Modern, Picasso’s “Head of a Sleeping Woman”, which reached 9.6 million (9/12 million). High-profile market-fresh works from a private collection of Latin American Modern brought more records, including Leonor Fini, Alice Rahon and Remedios Varo, whose surrealist self-portrait “Armonía (Autorretrato Sugerente)” from 1956’s proud of 5.2 million dollars (2/3 million) were approved.
