This report on Sotheby’s “I Have to Stay Home” sale by Colin Gleadell 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.) 

Short sales have become commonplace in lockdown—presumably catering to dealers or speculators needing quick turnover and liquidity. Since early April, Sotheby’s has staged 12 art sales with 66 or fewer lots; 8 have had fewer than 40 lots, with Hong Kong devising catchy titles like “Summer Love,” “Cheer Up,” or “Another World” to market the unending supply of works by Murakami, KAWS, and Asia’s latest favorite from the UK—Mr Doodle. The best performer of these, though, was “I Have to Stay at Home,” organized from London with just 32 lots.

In fact, after 12 lots were withdrawn, it ended up with just 20. Another feature of lockdown online auctions has been the volume of lots withdrawn at the last minute. This is a damage-control exercise for consignors who fear that a lot recorded unsold could be “burned.” Online withdrawals do not, as far as I can see, generally get recorded as such. They certainly disappear from the auction house websites.

In “I Have to Stay at Home,” which ended on May 20, having made £4.2 million in less than half an hour, the 12 withdrawn lots included Damien Hirst’s small 2009 spot painting, Catechol, with a £60,000–£80,000 estimate; Andy Warhol’s small Detail of The Last Supper, 1986, last sold at Sotheby’s London in 2018 by Hirst’s former manager, Frank Dunphy, for a double-estimate £150,000 (it came back with a too-daunting £120,000–£180,000 estimate); and a large Christopher Wool work on paper from 2000—one of two pieces in the sale acquired from the Eleni Koroneou gallery in Athens—with a £200,000–£300,000 estimate. (Sold prices include premium, estimates do not.)

Most of the remaining 20 lots had been bought or created in the last 5 years. Two had been sitting in Swiss free ports; one of those was Ed Ruscha’s The End, 2004, which suitably brought the sale to an end, selling near the low estimate after three bids for £187,500 ($231,000).

The painting hadn’t been there long, as it was bought at Phillips in New York this past November for $212,500. Like several other lots in the sale, losses where visible were minimal. A 1965 Zao Wou-Ki landscape that was bought at Sotheby’s Paris in 2018 for €771,000 (£700,000), and then shown by Lévy Gorvy in London last year, sold on the low estimate for £735,000 including premium. A sizable Günther Förg abstract from 2000, bought in 2015 for $218,400, looked better because of currency fluctuations in the interim, so it sold for £225,00 ($277,000). But a Frank Auerbach Head of Gerda Boehm, 1981, that cost £309,000 in 2018 went unsold with a £250,000 low estimate. The stand-out loss was Anish Kapoor’s fairly atypical sculpture, In Out, 2006, which was having its third outing in four years. It appears that both Sotheby’s and Christie’s have had it before, with ownership interest, but couldn’t sell the piece—estimates dropping each time. Now offered at one-third the original £250,000–£350,000 estimate in 2017, it went way below that for £81,250.

Occupying a now familiar top lot position was George Condo when his Woman with Golden Hair, 2018, which was guaranteed, sold within estimate for £1,275,000. The star lot, though, was a 2019 self-portrait by Egon Schiele–influenced Ghanaian artist, Amoako Boafo, who hit the auction scene at Phillips in London last year with The Lemon Bathing Suit, consigned by professional flipper Stefan Simchowitz; that painting sold for an awesome £675,000 ($881,432) against a £30,000 to £50,000 estimate ($39,130 to $65,217). A smaller oil on paper continued that momentum, attracting 26 bids before selling for £118,750 against a £30,000 high estimate.

Maybe the boldest decision of the sale was to include a Corona beer packet sculpture by Danh Vo. Found in Mexico and gilded in Thailand in 2015, the untitled work attracted three bids to sell within estimate for £75,000.