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

On Tuesday evening Christie's held its London Post War and Contemporary art sale. The sale offered 64 lots, with 51 selling for a sell through rate of 80%.  The sale totaled $108.47 million including buyers premiums aginast a pre sale estimate total of $86.4 million to $112 million. The sale sold a good 90% by value.

The top selling lot was by Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988), Untitled, 1982 which sold for $28.97 million including buyers premium.  The painting was last sold in 2002 for $1.2 million.  The Basquiat record at auction is $48.8 million sold at Christie's NY sale from last month.

The NY Times reported on the sale

The Christie’s salesroom was packed with a dedicated group of dealers and collectors who have been following the action from the New York auctions in May to the Venice Biennale and Art Basel in Switzerland. And while the best works at the Christie’s auction brought solid prices, it felt as though the steam was slowly starting to run out of the market.

“After New York and Basel, it was a challenge to keep clients focused,” said Brett Gorvy, Christie’s worldwide chairman of postwar and contemporary art. While Tuesday night’s sale seemed diminutive compared with the historic $495 million worth of art Christie’s sold in May, Mr. Gorvy said what surprised him about this auction was that he saw more activity from Asia than he had in New York. “There was a definite shift here, with more Asians and Europeans bidding, although in New York we saw more participation from Russia,” he said.

Of the 64 works in Tuesday night’s auction, 13 failed to sell. The evening totaled $108.4 million, within its $86.4 million to $112 million estimate. (Final prices include the buyer’s premium: 25 percent for the first $75,000; 20 percent on the next $75,001 to $1.5 million and 12 percent on the rest. Estimates do not reflect commissions.)

The Scottish painter Peter Doig has been something of a star in London, especially after his 2008 retrospective at Tate Britain. On Tuesday, César Reyes, a psychiatrist who lives in Puerto Rico and is one of the artist’s biggest collectors, was selling “Jetty,” a 1994 canvas of a lone figure on a dock at sunset. Four bidders went for the painting, which was estimated to bring $6.1 million to $9 million and was bought by a telephone bidder for $11.3 million.

Mr. Doig has an exhibition of paintings and drawings opening in August at the National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh that will travel to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in the winter. Another of his paintings — “White Out,” of a lone man standing in a blizzard, which was being sold by the French collector Marcel Brient — brought $2.9 million, well above its high $1.5 million estimate.

Source: The NY Times