Sotheby’s Contemporary day sale = £16.1m; Christie’s PWC day sale = £16.8m with a record price for Alex Katz

This commentary by Marion Maneker is available to AMMpro subscribers. (The first month of AMMpro is free and subscribers are welcome to sign up for the first month and cancel before they are billed.)

Phillips Evening sale performed well with 25 out of 28 lots sold or a 89% sell-through rate. As with all of this week’s sales, the sell-through rates were helped by third-party guarantees or otherwise perspicacious sale management. A couple of lots without support were sold at greatly compromised prices but sold nonetheless.

The Gerhard Richter jet made a decent £13.5m hammer price which worked out to £15.5m with fees or $20m. Three or four bidders drove the work to a 20% discount from the last ill-fated sale. So the buyer got a decent price but not a huge bargain.

Phillips was in no mood for another sale to fall through with the defalcation of the previous buyer and the tremor of Sotheby’s own champagne-glass waving bidder who backed out on Tuesday night. Bidders on the Richter jet were required to be pre-approved by the auction house.

Roy Lichtenstein’s editioned enamel sold to the guarantor for £4.5m hammer, a fate not substantially different from a similar work sold earlier in the week.

Farther down the top ten list we begin to find the works that had sustained competition. Those include Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Untitled (Velveeta), which continued the week’s strong interest in Basquiat lots priced in the six and seven figures, and Cecily Brown’s Armed and Fearless which got bid to a premium price more than twice the high estimate.

Sotheby’s London Contemporary Day sale = £16.1m

Sotheby’s posted £16,106,625 ($21,175,380) for their London Contemporary day sale coming in a little below the range of the pre-sale estimate of £14.2-20.1m.

• The lead lot was Keith Haring’s Untitled from 1983, which £975,000 ($1.3m) over a £600k high estimate.

• Gerhard Richter’s Abstraktes Bild from 1993, made £879k ($1.2m) over a £700k high estimate.
• Anselm Kiefer’s Walfisch (2000), a three meter wide work, sold for £495k ($650k)
• Robert Indiana’s LOVE sold for £675k ($887k)
• Rose Wylie’s Listening to Miss S from 1993, achieved £106,250 ($139,687)

Christie’s PWC Day Sale = £16.8m

Christie’s Post-War and Contemporary Art Day Auction made £16,812,375 ($22,125,085) with 84% of the lots sold.

• In their evening sale, Christie’s put a weak version of a Cy Twombly drawing similar to the one that sold during day. The day lot was featured and attracted 10 bidders eventually selling for £2,471,250 ($3,252,165)
• Alex Katz’s Ada and Louise made an auction record of £947,250 ($1,246,580)