A Chinese taxi driver turned billionaire art collector has paid a record-breaking $170m (£113m) for a painting of a nude woman by Amedeo Modigliani at an auction in NY.
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“Reclining Nude” was sold at Christie’s on Monday after a protracted bidding battle.
The painting, called “Nu Couché” (Reclining Nude), belongs to a group of ten works of reclining nudes in which the nude model is shown reclining across the same vivid red couch. Paul Cézanne’s The Card Players is the most expensive painting: it was sold for $250 million in 2011.
The price set a world record for Modigliani, and it was the second highest price ever recorded at an auction for an art work, the Associated Press reported.
The painting sold in nine minutes with bids by five prospective buyers, a Christie’s spokesperson told CNN.
The work, whose title means “Reclining Nude”, was completed in 1918 by the Italian modernist painter and Monday’s sale set a new record for Modigliani’s work.
Although the final price, which includes buyer’s premium, surpassed the presale target of more than $80 million, only one bidder wanted the work, a client of Laura Paulson, Christie’s senior worldwide director in the postwar and contemporary art department.
A Lucian Freud portrait of the ex-husband of Britain’s Duchess of Cornwall, Andrew Parker Bowles, sold for $34.89 million in NY on Tuesday, Christie’s said. “It was the best painting Modigliani ever made”.
With that in mind, we’ve put together a quiz to see if you can judge the percieved value of a work of art compared to something you might expect to come at an eye-watering price. The auction house estimates it will fetch in excess of $100 million.
The other Gauguin, “Young Man with a Flower”, is a painting of a Tahitian youth wearing a white shirt, loose cravat and a white blossom tucked behind his ear.
“We are in a masterpiece market”, said Jussi Pylkkanen, who led the auction, adding that the rare and important works on offer “created a huge amount of energy and biding”. The museum was founded by Liu Yiqian. Christie’s said interest in Picasso’s late period musketeer portraits has grown dramatically in recent years. Courbet’s 1862 canvas, “Femme nue couchee”, was estimated at $15 million to $25 million.
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Wang Zhongjun (co-founder and CEO of entertainment company Huayi Brothers) – Purchased a Pablo Picasso for million in August 2015. Sotheby’s’ contemporary sale follows on Wednesday.
