A Pablo Picasso portrait of his lover Dora Maar, as soon as owned by murdered Italian clothier Gianni Versace, bought just below funds at $20 million.
Advertisement
The unsold works are likely to find buyers in the days after the auction, said Simon Shaw, co-head of Sotheby’s worldwide Impressionist and modern art department. This morning, the modern-and-contemporary-art auction realized a total of $42.65 million, while the American art will be auctioned off later this month and the old masters will sell in that department’s major sale season in January.
A three month sale of rare artworks belonging to the late American billionaire A. Alfred Taubman began on Wednesday at Sotheby’s auction house in New York.
The painting, one of Modigliani’s last and dated 1919, went for US$42.81 million – far above pre-sale estimates in excess of US$25 million.
Fueled by rising demand from Asia and the Gulf, the spring season noticed a brand new document for a murals bought at public sale $179.four million for Picasso’s “The Girls of Algiers (Model zero)”. The collection could fetch a total of $500 million.
A Paul Gaugin landscape beat its high, but in other cases – as with Degas and Calder – a famous name wasn’t enough to push the sale price over the low-ball estimates. Though there were a few stunners by Amedeo Modigliani, Frank Stella and Willem De Kooning that met or surpassed their estimates, there were also good-but-not-great works by Degas, Rothko, Picasso and others that came up wanting. Frank Stella’s 1961 painting Delaware Crossing doubled the artist’s previous auction record when it sold for $13.7 million.
All of the property, including works to be featured in other upcoming sales, was guaranteed by Sotheby’s and reported to weigh in at an unprecedented $500 million, regardless of how the huge trove performed. The current van Gogh auction record is $82.5 million.
But a gray-black Jasper Johns abstract, “Disappearance I”, estimated to sell for $15 million didn’t garner any bids, and no one wanted Edgar Degas’s sensuous portrait of a nude woman brushing her red hair after taking a bath, “Nude Woman, Back”. It was one of Modigliani’s last portraits before his death in 1920 and Taubman acquired the work from the Acquavella Galleries in 1983, the same year he acquired Sotheby’s with the help of several private investors, including Henry Ford II. Among the centrepieces are a seductive nude portrait by Modigliani that could set a new auction record for the artist if bidding soars to $100 million as the auction house predicts.
Another highlight of that sale is Andy Warhol’s “Mao”, created in 1972 and the pop artist’s earliest silkscreen iteration of China’s former chairman Mao Zedong.
Advertisement
Be proactive – Use the “Flag as Inappropriate” link at the upper right corner of each comment to let us know of abusive posts.
