Results: Sotheby's Lehman Brothers

As I mentioned in the a post the other day, it appears the Sotheby's NY sale of modern and contemporary art at Sotheby's from the Neuberger Lehman collection was strong, and the final results do support that assumption.  The sale offered 142 lots with 118 selling for a respectable 83.1% buy through rate.  The total sale brought in $12.3 million, with 17 record prices for artists at auction and 6 records by medium at auction.

The main disappointment of the sale was a Damien Hirst We've got Style, (The Vessel Collection, blue/green) with a pres sale estimate of $1 million failed to sell. With that in mind, the sale does not appear to be only top heavy, but interest in items through out the sale.

Alexander Peers writing for the NY Observer stated 

Neuberger had an unusual strategy: It bought low-cost works by emerging artists and also bottom-fished for works by bigger name ones, sometimes buying what had failed to sell at auction. In some cases, Neuberger Berman had paid about $25,000 for artworks, by artists likd as John Currin and Mark Grotjahn, that sold for about 10 times that at the auction. According to people close to the matter, executives of Neuberger-Berman overlooked the sale from a private skybox.

Seventeen artist's records were set. A $1.02 million record was set for Julie Mehretu's "Untitled," 2001. Though far from a household name, her work was recently added to the Goldman, Sachs corporate collection. A few of the 142 Lehman works up for sale were bought by the Buenos Aires Museum, which paid $92,500 for a Robert Longo.

Christie's will sell works owned by the European offices of Lehman at an auction Sept. 29.