Sotheby's strong South Asian sale; Ketterer's €28m Spring sales; The Kleptocrats documentary; Two Palms lets Dana Schutz and Carroll Dunham talk.

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.)

Sotheby’s South Asian = £7.45m ($9.5m)

Bhupen Khakhar, Two Men in Benares (£450-600k) £2.535m

Sotheby’s Modern & Contemporary South Asian Art sales together made £7,459,000 ($9.5 million) above the pre-sale estimate of £4.1 - 5.8m which excludes fees. These sales have not been at this level for nearly a decade. A single-owner sale, Coups de Coeur: The Guy and Helen Barbier Family Collection, comprising 29 works that had never been auctioned, the majority of the pieces having been acquired directly from the artists themselves, doubled its pre-sale estimate of £2.1-2.9m to sell for £5,489,875. The top lot in that sale was Bhupen Khakhar’s landmark Two Men in Benares (1982) which established a new record for the artist at £2.54m ($3.2m) (£450,000-600,000), more than doubling the previous benchmark of £1.1 million set by De-Luxe Tailors (1972) at Sotheby’s auction of Howard Hodgkin’s collection in 2017.