The Impressionist and Modern Art Evening Sale
and the auction of Art of the Surreal held on February 7, 2012 at Christie's in
Londonn realised £134,999,400 / $213,299,052 / €162,269,279 selling 86% by
lot and 93% by value.
The sales had
a combined pre-sale
estimate of £86.2
million to £127.1 million.
At this evening's auction, 3 lots sold for over
£10 million, 6 for over £5 million and 28 for over £1 million. The sale
attracted bidding from around the world and buyers originated from more than 21
countries in 4 continents.
The top price was paid for Reclining Figure:
Festival, 1951, by Henry Moore(1898-1986) which realized £19,081,250 / $30,148,375
/ €22,935,663– a world record price for the artist at auction.
“These strong results illustrate that the art
market continues to attract significant levels of spending, particularly
for the rarest and most exceptional
works of art. It is an extremely intelligent market where pricing is key – and
where collectors react with the greatest determination to the rarest works of
art, and particularly to those which are fresh to the market. We are
particularly pleased to
have established record prices for two
great artists of
the 20th century: Henry Moore and Joan
Miró. In both
cases, we offered
works of art
that were among
the greatest produced
by the artists, and their quality drew the most
determined of bidding. It has been a great honour to have presented fine art
from The Collection of Elizabeth Taylor, and to have seen three works sold this
evening for twice our expectations”, said Giovanna Bertazzoni,
International Head of
Impressionist and Modern Art, Christie's.
Leading highlights of the sale:
The
top price was
paid for Reclining
Figure: Festival, 1951,
by Henry Moore
(1898-1986) which realised £19,081,250 / $30,148,375 / €22,935,663– a
world record price for the artist at auction. In 1949, the year after Moore was
awarded the international prize for sculpture at the Venice Biennale, he was
commissioned by the Arts Council to create a sculpture for the 1951 Festival
of Britain; the sculpture sold
at this evening's auction is this
work. Its importance lies not
only in the significance of the commission itself but also it functions as a
key to this period of Moore's work. It was acquired by an anonymous telephone
bidder after a 5 minute bidding battle.
Painting-Poem (“le corps de ma
brune puisque je l'aime comme ma chatte habillée en vert salade comme de la
grêle c'est pareil”), 1925, by Joan
Miró (1893-1983) sold
for £16,841,250 /
$26,609,175 / €20,243,183 – a world
record price for
the artist at
auction (estimate: £6-9
million). Part abstract void, part lyrical free-form
painting and part hand-written stream-of-consciousness poetry, Le corps de
ma brune… is one of the finest and best-known of an extraordinary group
of paintings produced by
the artist in
1925, in which
he successfully pushed
beyond the conventional boundaries
of painting and
the picture-plane to
create a radical
new mental space; fusing word
image and painterly form into a new free-form of expression conveying an
hallucinatory or dream-like state of consciousness.
“Le
livre”, 1914-1915, by
Juan Gris (1887-1927)
sold for £10,345,250
/ $16,345,495 / €12,434,991. Executed in Paris between the
end of 1914 and the start of 1915, the painting marks the artist's change of
stylistic approach to working from
an abstract compositional armature towards its subject
matter. First shown at the major post-war Cubisme exhibition at the Galerie
de France, Paris,
in 1945 and
subsequently shown throughout
Europe and America
in the 1940s, 50s and
60s, it was
then unseen for
30 years until
the 2005 retrospective in
Madrid.
"La Corne d'Or,
Constantinople", 1907, by Paul Signac (1863-1935) sold for £8,777,250
,$13,868,055 ,€10,550,255 while Henry Moore's Working Model for Three piece N°3
Vertebrae fetched £5,081,250 ,$8,028,375 ,€6,107,663.
A painting titled “La Tour Eiffel”, 1926 by
Robert Delaunay (1885-1941) was sold at a world record price of £3,737,250, $5,904,855 ,€4,492,175 against a
high estimate of 2 millions while “Le Nu et le mannequin", 1947 by Belgian
artist Paul Delvaux realised £3,401,250 ,$5,373,975 ,€4,088,303. Meanwhile
“Thema: Spitz”, 1927 by Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) sold for £2,953,250
,$4,666,135 ,€3,549,807
Three
works of art
from the storied
Collection of Elizabeth
Taylor fetched a
combined £13,787,750 ($21,784,645 /€16,572,876), more than doubling
their pre-sale low estimate of £6.2 million
Vue de l'asile et de la Chapelle de Saint-Rémy,
by Vincent van Gogh fetched the top price of the group at £10,121,250
($15,991,575 /€12,165,743. The luminous landscape, painted in the turquoise
and ochre hues of early autumn, is a view of the asylum where the artist spent
his last months. Elizabeth
Taylor's father, the art dealer Francis Taylor, had purchased the painting on
her behalf at auction in 1963 for £92,000. Up until her death in March of 2011,
the painting had hung in the living room of Miss Taylor's home in Bel Air, CA.
Earlier in the sale, a youthful self-portrait by Edgar Degas (1834-1917) sold
for £713,250 ($1,126,935 / € 857,327) and a large-scale landscape by Claude
Pissarro (1830-1903) entitled Pommiers à Éragny realized £2,953,250 ($4,666,135
/€ 3,549,807.
In December 2011, Christie's New York sold Miss
Taylor's exquisite collections of jewelry, fashion, decorative arts and
memorabilia in a four-day marathon auction series that totalled $156.8 million
and set multiple new auction records.
Christie's was honoured to have been entrusted
by the Hubertus Wald Charitable Foundation with the sale of their founder's
collection. Hubertus Wald, a philanthropic collector from Hamburg, Germany,
put together one
of the great collections of
20th century art
in continental Europe. At
this evening's auction, 17 works realised a combined total of
£11,723,650 / $18,523,367 / €14,091,827 against a pre-sale estimate of £6.9
million to £10.5 million.
Art of the Surreal
Since 2001, Christie's have dedicated a section
of the February evening sale in London to surrealist art. This evening's
auction of Art of the Surreal realised £37,185,250 / $58,752,695 / €44,696,671
– the highest ever total for
the category (included
in the sale totals above).
The top price
was paid for Painting-Poem (“le corps de ma brune puisque je
l'aime comme ma chatte habillée en vert salade comme de la grêle c'est
pareil”), 1925, by
Joan Miró (1893-1983)
which sold for
£16,841,250 / $26,609,175
/ €20,243,183 – a world record price for the artist at auction (see
above).
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