Judd Tully gives a little depth on Phillips de Pury’s £5.7m London sale:
Only one work sold for over a million pounds and that was Lucio Fontana’s slashed canvas “Concetto Spaziale, Attese” in virginal white from 1960, which sold to an anonymous telephone bidder for a little over £1 million ($1.7 million) (est. £1-1.5 million/$1.6-$2.4 million). The most remarkable thing about the Fontana is that it was once owned by Andy Warhol and sold back at Sotheby’s New York in May 1987, shortly after the artist’s death following gallbladder surgery for a minute $132,000 figure.
“Prices are strong,” the Paris-based collector John Sayegh- Belchatowski said. “The market is deep, not like the fantasy of 2007,” said Sayegh-Belchatowski, who was outbid on the two lots he hoped to buy.
Phillips de Pury’s Petite London Sale Scores $9 Million, Buoyed by Andy Warhol’s Fontana (ArtInfo)
Andy Warhol’s Slashed Fontana Painting Boosts $9 Million Auction in London (Bloomberg)