The analysis of the November 2020 Impressionist and Modern Art Day Sales at Sotheby's 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.)

Leading up to its final evening sale of the season set to take place on December 8, Sotheby's announced its contemporary and modern art day auctions brought in a total of $79.4 million last week. Led by Degas, Matisse, Dali and Lévy-Dhurmer in the top-tier, the impressionist and modern art segment of the series brought in $30.5 million with buyer's premium, hammering at a collective $24.4 million, just 2 percent above the pre-sale estimate of $23.9 million.

The analysis of the November 2020 Contemporary Art Day Sales at Sotheby's 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.)

Earlier this month, Sotheby’s announced plans to stage two stand-alone day sales devoted to modern and contemporary art leading up to its early December evening sale. In a normal, non-pandemic, non-Presidential election year, this would be the time when we would have both Day and Evening sales in New York. But this isn't a normal year. On Friday, the house announced those two auctions achieved a collective total of $74.9 million. The contemporary segment of the day sales, which included a live and online auction, brought in $48.8 million, coming up short of the combined $57.8 million pre-sale low estimate.

The live sale saw a 76.5 percent sell-through rate with 257 lots sold; the online sale saw 225 lots find buyers, which calculates to an even lower statistic of just 64 percent of lots sold.

The analysis of the Fall 2020 Old Masters auctions at Christie's and Sotheby's 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.)

A painting by Barkley L. Hendricks will head to auction next week during Sotheby’s contemporary art day sale in New York on November 17. Jackie Sha-La-La (Jackie Cameron), a portrait of a reclining floral dress-clad woman from 1975, is expected to fetch a price of $2 million–$3 million. If it reaches its high estimate, it will come close to the artist's current record price of $3.7 million, set when his double-portrait Yocks from the same year sold at Sotheby's in 2019. Yocks had an estimate of $900,000–$1.2 million.

Other highlights on offer at Sotheby’s include Helen Frankenthaler’s 13-foot painting Giant Step (1975), which was given an estimate of $1.2 million–$1.8 million, and Wayne Thiebaud’s Pop-style ice cream painting Single Triple Decker (2004), which is estimated at $1.5 million–$2 million. Other notable artists featured in the sale include Keith Haring, Matthew Wong, and Titus Kaphar. The pre-sale estimate total for the contemporary art day auction is $35.6 million– $50.7 million.

The present work has the highest estimate ever given to a Hendricks painting at auction. It follows the recent sale of another female portrait by the artist at the house: Latin from Manhattan…The Bronx Actually (1980), which sold for $1.5 million in Sotheby's "Contemporary Curated" auction in October. That painting beat its estimate of $700,000–$1 million. Weeks before, Artnet News reported that the painter’s dealer New York’s Jack Shainman Gallery found a buyer for a work by the artist—the details of which have not been disclosed— for $14 million.

The analysis of the Fall 2020 Old Masters auctions at Christie's and Sotheby's 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.)

A host of museum-caliber names, Cranach, Gentileschi, Van Dyck changed hands at auction this fall. They were among more than 300 Old Master artworks traded at Christie's and Sotheby's this October. In total, the main sales of the Old Masters in New York generated $30.6 million. In recent years, the Old Masters market's figures have lagged compared to the Modern and Contemporary art categories. This shortfall has been attributed to a rarity of masterpieces. A few top works can have a substantial influence on overall totals. Following the financial strains of the coronavirus pandemic, the category got a boost this season with a surge of deaccessioned works from the Brooklyn Museum of Art sold at Christie's.

The top ten works sold across the October sales accounted for half of the total sales volume, this aligns with the trends seen at the top of the modern and contemporary auction as well. Regarding the overall performance, the total hammer price of the works sold was $24.8 million, falling just below the aggregate low estimated value of $25.8 million, a figure that betrays weak demand against ambitious estimates. 31 percent of the sold lots reached above the high expectation and 29 percent hammered within their estimates; the remaining 40% of lots sold for a price below the expected value—the last figure is almost double that of the modern and contemporary category. This number, and a low 67 percent sell-through rate indicates a high risk for some Old Masters consignors, as non-masterwork objects in the category become more challenging to place with buyers.

The report on Sotheby's October 28th Livestream Evening sale includes the seller of a Magritte and two Picassos and the details of the van Gogh. It 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.)

Following Sotheby’s $142.8 million contemporary art sales, all 36 lots in the Impressionist & Modern Art sale sold for $141 million against an estimate of $111 million to $160 million after the withdrawal of 3 lots. For those who think the Impressionist and Modern market is in decline, the average lot price from the samplings provided was not very different from the contemporary art sold earlier. In fact, the high end did rather better.

Here, the major lots going into the sale were two lifetime cast bronze sculptures by Alberto Giacometti estimated at $20 million–$30 million and $12 million–$18 million. Both were being sold by Revlon chief Ron Perelman, and both were guaranteed. The cheaper of the two was withdrawn because it had been sold privately before the sale, while the other, Femme Leoni (1947) from an edition of six, sold for $25.9 million (prices include the buyer’s premium, estimates do not). Six-and-a-half-foot casts of Femme Leoni are rare on the market. Number 5 from the edition of 6 sold fifteen years ago for $8.4 million during a Christie’s New York Impressionist and modern art sale. Perelman’s was number 3 from the edition, and sold to an Asian buyer for a mid-estimate $25.9 million.

After a flurry of additional third-party guarantees were announced before the sale, it turned out that Sotheby’s had covered the ground on more than half the lots. In addition, 23 lots had their reserves lowered sufficiently to allow that many winning bids below estimate. Result? A well-managed crisis and a 100 percent sell-through.