With apologies for the headline, provenance sells no matter how clichéd. The Gunther Sachs sale made $56.3m at Sotheby’s.
Bloomberg’s Scott Reyburn caught the bidding in London where Jose Mugrabi nabbed a Warhol flowers, missed out on a bunch of other stuff, including the Allen Jones furniture that went nuts:
- “I remember when a set of these came up for auction in the early 1980s,” Mugrabi said in an interview. “They sold for about $15,000. I thought they were too vulgar then. Taste evolves and they now appeal to the new generation of collectors.”
Warhol still made the biggest impression for the evening. The sale’s success may bring more of the estate’s art on to the market in the future:
- “The Bardot was the bargain of the night,” the Montreal- based collector Francois Odermatt said in an interview. “We shouldn’t judge Sachs’s taste just from this sale. The family has kept a lot of the best pieces. After these results, they might do a Gunter Sachs II auction.”
Warhol Bardot, Self Portrait Boost $56 Million Sachs Sale (Bloomberg)