Today, Phillips staged its Works on Paper and Editions sale which brought in $5.4 million placing 232 lots with buyers and realizing a successful sell-through rate of 95%. Pablo Picasso, Portrait de jeune fille, d’après Cranach le Jeune (Portrait of a Young Woman, After Cranach the Younger) saw the highest result among the sale’s offerings. Four bidders competed for the Picasso edition, driving the hammer price up to $590,000. The work eventually sold for $728,000 with buyer’s fees, besting its pre-sale estimate of $300,000 to $500,000. Coming fresh to the market, with only one previous owner based in Los Angeles, who acquired the work from Galerie Michael in Beverly Hills, the portrait is one of Picasso’s earliest linoleum cut prints made in 1958 following his initial experimentation with the medium beginning in 1953-4. Based off of a picture by German Old Master painter, Lucas Cranach the Younger, the work features Picasso’s reinvention between classic theme and modern technique—it was made in collaboration with printmaker, Hidalgo Arnéra.
Elsewhere in the auction, works by Roy Lichtenstein, Gerhard Richter, Wayne Thiebaud, and Andy Warhol performed well, reaching above their estimates. A group of works were sold to benefit the The Museum of Modern Art’s Acquisitions Fund. Thiebaud’s Delights from 1965 set a new benchmark for the series going for $293,750. The result comes it at more than four times the work’s low estimate of $60,000. Another record was set with Warhol’s Hammer and Sickle dated 1977 that sold for $93,750 more than double the low pre-sale value of $40,000.
“The resilience of the prints and multiples market along with abiding collector interest in Phillips’ signature curation of topquality editions across the 20th and 21st centuries continues to show important vibrancy” said Kelly Troester and Cary Leibowitz, Phillips’ Co-Heads of Editions in a post-sale statement.
Phillips representatives reported more than $2 million achieved via online bidding, more than 1,100 online bidders, and nearly half of all the works achieved prices above the high estimate. This sale follows on a series of online Editions auctions that achieved record prices for prints by Genieve Figgis, Leon Polk Smith, Alexander Calder, Sonia Delaunay, Zao Wou-Ki, Peter Saul and Felix Gonzalez-Torres, amongst others.
