Sotheby’s auction breaks record for highest sales

PanARMENIAN.Net - A Sotheby’s auction featuring rare impressionist and modern works by Monet, Matisse and Picasso has broken the record for the highest sales total ever reached at a London auction, the Guardian reports.

The evening auction on Tuesday, Feb 3, raised an overall total of £186.44mln, almost £50mln over Sotheby’s estimate, and broke auction records for five individual works by artists including Seurat and Malevich as bidders from 35 different countries clamoured to get their hands on the many iconic works up for sale.

The most expensive work of the night was Monet’s 1908 oil painting Le Grand Canal, which sold for £23.7mln – the highest ever price for any of Monet’s Venice view works. The painting, which was part of a private collection, had been on loan to the National Gallery in London since 2006.

The five Monet works that formed a central part of the auction sold for a total of £55.74m. These included his 1887 work Les Peupliers à Giverny, which was up for auction for the first time, having adorned the collections of both the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Art Institute of Chicago, and went for £10.8mln.

A total of 14 bidders competed for the rare Monet works, among them his 1871 painting L’Embarcadère, which was bought for £10.3mln, and his 1888 oil Antibes vue de la Salis, one of four paintings the impressionist did of the gardens of La Salis in the south of France, which went for £8.7mln.

Other notable sales of the evening included Matisse’s portrait Odalisque au Fauteuil Noir, portraying Princess Nezy-Hamide Chawkat, which fetched the second highest total of the evening, £15.8mln. It was also the first time French painter Toulouse-Lautrec’s work Au Lit: Le Baiser had been offered at auction. Not having publicly exhibited for more than four decades, it soared to a final price of £10.8mln.

A Malevich self-portrait, which was featured in the recent retrospective at the Tate Modern, also reached a record price for a work on paper, selling for £5.8mln – over five times its estimate. A symbol of the artist’s renewed recognition and status in the art market, it sold for just £163,000 in 2004.

Speaking after the auction, specialist in charge Helena Newman said: “This very strong result is a reflection of the quality of the material we see here today and that we were able to bring to the market this time round. The people who came out were serious figures, seasoned collectors, and even new buyers for this really great material, much of which was appearing for the first time ever at auction.

“We were particularly delighted to have been entrusted with a collection of nine works from a US collector, which included Monet, Matisse and further works, and came to a grand total of £36mln. All together, it is a fantastic result. What is reassuring is that people are as keen and enthusiastic about quality works as ever.”