Results: Christie's London Post War and Contemporary Art Evening Sale

Christie's London just held its evening Post War and Contemporary Art sale.  The sale offer ed 65 lots with 58 selling, for an excellent 89% sell through rate.  The sale totaled $126.5 million (including buyers premium), and sold a very strong 95% by value, showing good values across most of the auction.  This was the second highest total for this category in London.  The top selling lot was Francis Bacon’s Portrait of Henrietta Moraes which sold for $33.47 million (pre sale estimate was not published).  The top ten lots were all listed as anonymous buyers.  Overall a very good evening.

Christie's reported on the sale

Christie's evening auction of Post-War & Contemporary Art totaled £80,576,100 ($126,504,477 / €96,127,287) selling 95% by value and 89% by lot. This is the 2nd highest total for the category at Christie’s London. The top lot of the sale was Francis Bacon’s Portrait of Henrietta Moraes which sold for £21.3 million.

Combined with Post-War & Contemporary art offered from Living With Art: A Private European Collection on 9th and 10th February, sales in the category this month have realised £96.6 million to date.

Francis Outred, Christie's Head of Post-War & Contemporary Art, Europe: “I am thrilled with the outstanding results of our evening auction of Post-War & Contemporary Art, the second highest total in these rooms for the category, only surpassed by the June 2008 auction at the height of the market (£ 86.2 million). Following the exceptional success of the Henry Moore last week, the best of British was completed by the Francis Bacon, ‘Portrait of Henrietta Moraes’ which achieved over 20million pounds. Having had only two owners in its near 50 year history, the work had not been on the open market before and had not been seen in public for almost twenty years. As a result it created a fierce battle of 6 telephone bidders to achieve its over-estimate price. During the week of the opening of the extraordinary Lucian Freud exhibition at the National Portrait gallery, the ‘Boat, Connemara’ drawing, a complete discovery, went well beyond the estimate to achieve £657,250. In an Olympics year with so much profile on British art, Christie’s is proud to have set these results as a message to the world of the strength and popularity of British art”.