WORLD
Christie’s Contemporary Art Auction Sets Record at $495 Million
Baku, May 20 (AZERTAC). Record prices for 12 contemporary artists including Jackson Pollock, Roy Lichtenstein and Jean-Michel Basquiat made history on Wednesday night. The sale of postwar and contemporary art at Christie’s in Rockefeller Center totaled $495 million, the highest sales figure at any art auction.
Even the pros were reeling. “It shows how broad the market is — as in deep pockets,” said the dealer Larry Gagosian.
A salesroom overflowing with high-profile collectors — including the Los Angeles financier Eli Broad; the Barnes & Noble founder Leonard Riggio; the vice chairman of Blackstone Group, J. Tomlison Hill; and the chairman of J. Crew, Millard Drexler — watched with rapt attention as work after work fetched higher and higher prices.
Of the 70 works up for sale, only 4 failed to find buyers. The evening soared far above Sotheby’s sale of contemporary art on Tuesday night, which brought $293.6 million. Even though Sotheby’s managed to set records for artists like Barnett Newman and Gerhard Richter, that was not enough to fuel bidding on other works of art.
At Christie’s, one of Pollock’s classic drip paintings — “No. 19, 1948” — won the top price of the night, a record $58.3 million with fees. Four telephone bidders went for the painting, whose entire surface was covered with layer upon layer of delicate drips, and it finally went to an anonymous bidder through Brett Govy, chairman of Christie’s postwar and contemporary art department worldwide. Owned by the Washington industrialist Mitchell P. Rales and his wife, Emily, it had last been at auction at Christie’s in May 1993, when it was bought for $2.4 million by François Pinault, the luxury goods magnate and collector who owns Christie’s. Several years later, he sold it to the Raleses.
Ronald O. Perelman, the New York investor, must have also been a happy seller. He was the owner of Lichtenstein’s “Woman With Flowered Hat,” a 1963 painting that is the Pop artist’s take on a Picasso canvas with the same title. Laurence Graff, the London jeweler, bought the Lichtenstein for $50 million, or $56.1 million with fees, well above its $32 million high estimate; it also was a record setter for the artist at auction.