Results: Sotheby's Contemporary Evening Sale

Unfortunately, Sotheby's had to follow the success of Christie's record breaking $691.58 million contemporary art sale from Tuesday evening. Sotheby's did have a respectful sale but given the expectations and quality of art it was not considered as strong as what Christie's had offered. That being said, in the two evening contemporary sales an amazing amount of art dollars were spent, totaling over $1 billion.

The details are, the Sotheby's Contemporary Evening sale totaled $380.64 million including buyers premiums against a pre sale auction total estimate of $303.2 million to $424.6 million.  Not bad and on the stronger side of the estimates.  The sale offered 61 lots with 54 selling for a very respectable sell through rate of 88.5%.  The sale sold 94.8% by value.  The top selling lot accounted for over 25% of the sales total, which was Andy Warhol's Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster) of 1963 (see image).  It sold for $105.445 million including buyers premium against a pre sale estimate of $60-80 million. Of the top ten selling lots 5 sold above the high estimate, 4 withing the estimated range and 1 sold below the low estimate.

Bloomberg reported on the sale

Sotheby’s sale was more subdued than Christie’s because the material was less prized.

“They didn’t have the goods, but when they did they were very successful,” said Lucy Mitchell-Innes, a New York dealer.

Warhol’s “Car Crash” was estimated at more than $60 million. (Prices include fees; estimates do not.) The 1963 work was won by a phone client of Charles Moffett, vice chairman of Sotheby’s Americas, who vied with at least two other highly determined telephone bidders.

More than 8 feet tall and 13 feet wide, it consists of two canvases. One features five rows of three images repeating a mangled car; the second is a blank silvery surface.

Warhol’s previous auction record was set in 2007 at Christie’s when a single-panel car-crash painting, “Green Car Crash (Green Burning Car I)” sold for $71.7 million.

Another highlight was a group of paintings from hedge-fund billionaire Steven A. Cohen, whose SAC Capital Advisors LP pleaded guilty to securities fraud and agreed to pay $1.8 billion to settle insider-trading charges.

The Cohen trove tallied at least $77 million. Sotheby’s guaranteed Cohen an undisclosed minimum price for six of the pieces.

Top Price

The priciest was Gerhard Richter’s 1986 abstract painting “A.B. Courbet,” which sold for $26.5 million, exceeding the $20 million high estimate. It was last shown publicly on the Pace Gallery stand at the Art Basel fair in 2012 with an asking price between $20 million and $25 million.

Warhol’s 1963 “Liz #1 (Early Colored Liz)” sold for $20.3 million against the estimate of $20 million to $30 million. The 40-inch-square canvas depicts Elizabeth Taylor’s face on an acid-yellow background.

Cohen’s abstract painting by Brice Marden titled “The Attended” fetched $10.9 million, an auction record for the U.S. artist.
The Mugrabi family, which sold Warhol’s “Coca-Cola (3)” for $57.3 million at Christie’s the night before, splurged on Jean-Michel Basquiat’s 1982 painting “Untitled (Yellow Tar and Feathers)” for $25.9 million.

The works consigned by the Dia Art Foundation to create an acquisition fund raised $38.4 million. One of them, a 1959 group of 24 drawings by Twombly called “Poems by the Sea,” sold for $21.7 million, surging past the estimate range of $6 million to $8 million.

“There are a lot of new collectors, a lot of empty walls to fill,” said New York art dealer Dominique Levy.

Source: Bloomberg & Sotheby's