The Tamesis
If paying $7.6 million for a set of 4-foot-tall smiling wooden bears has anything to do with it, prices at major auction houses’ mid-season sales could rise.
Last Thursday, Christie’s auction house sold a 1988 sculpture by Jeff Koons winter bear (1988), with a presale estimate of $3.8 million to $5 million, is the most valuable work in mid-season auction history. This price point is more common at major large evening sales. Koons produced this work (it was produced using time-honored Rococo techniques) for his famous Banality exhibition in 1988; the work just sold at Christie’s comes from the collection of Barbara Jakobson and is number 1 of an edition of three plus an artist’s fine print. The second edition is in the collection of the Tate Gallery, while the third edition and the AP are in a private collection (the latter sold at Christie’s in 2011 for $4.7 million).
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Overall, these biannual sales have been growing slowly. This time, Christie’s auction house auctioned a total of 229 lots, with a total transaction volume of US$34 million (of which 3 lots were withdrawn and 42 (about 8%) failed to be sold). At the corresponding sale in September, Christie’s achieved the highest total in auction history: 293 lots and $35 million. In 2022-23, the same sales total $15 million to $17 million. “More and more people are looking to our mid-season venues as the place to get serious art,” Christie’s specialist Rachel Ng told us art news.
While Christie’s has a high total and a high volume of sales, Sotheby’s has taken a different tack. Last March, Sotheby’s expert Haleigh Stoddard said that after a 101-lot “Contemporary Curation” sale art news “Low volume, high value ratio… [is] “We are very interested in exploring this further at our mid-season sale,” the auction house said later. In September, the Contemporary Curated sale increased, but not significantly, to 132 lots (totaling $32.7 million). This is still a far cry from the 276 lots auctioned in March 2024. Last week, the auction house held its first “Contemporary Curated” sale at its new Breuer building. Madison Avenue, 119 lots earned $19.4 million (7 artworks were withdrawn, 21 artworks failed to sell, and the sell-through rate was 81%).
Last week’s “Contemporary Curating” was headlined by Alma Thomas’ 1970 paintings Snoopy sees sunrise on earth. After being off the market for 48 years, the painting was sold for $3.8 million, the second-highest price ever paid for a Thomas work at auction. The second highest score was a 1966 painting by Helen Frankenthaler purple mountains, $998,400. Two artists set new records at Sotheby’s: Miyoko Ito’s 1977 painting Nagisa Pat Passlof painting from 1973-74 sells for $640,000, twice its high estimate horn Earned $537,600.
The prices for the works in both houses far exceeded their expectations. Unique painted photographs of Gerhard Richter at Sotheby’s Untitled (5.2.89) The sale price was $409,600, eight times the high estimate. At Christie’s, the estimate for a painting by Mary Abbott soared to $30,000 to $50,000, to $209,000.
It is worth noting that Sotheby’s and Christie’s have also seen extremely low prices for some works sold without reserve prices. At Christie’s, a 2011 Doug Aitken lightbox (the first of four plus two artist proofs) was estimated at $25,000 to $35,000; it sold for just $889. At Sotheby’s, rock bottom prices are a lesson in the complexity of value. On the day of the auction, critic Greg Allen wrote an article praising Rachel Harrison’s 2008 work mustard and ketchup He noted that the work had just been shown publicly for the first time at a Sotheby’s preview (her gallery, Greene Naftali, sold the work on the sidelines of the show). The artwork has a presale estimate of $20,000 to $30,000. The final price was just $1,152.
(Here’s a sneaky trick: There are still prints from this series by Angela Heisch that you can buy for $2,495, with a portion of the money going to charity…or you can buy one on the secondary market, like someone just did at Christie’s, for just $127.)
In the final sale of the mid-season sale, Phillips brought in $8.5 million on Saturday from its 149-lot “Modern and Contemporary Art” sale (three lots were withdrawn and 15 unsold; a sell-through rate of 91% by lot and a sell-through rate of 94% by value). The number one lot is by Andy Warhol Molly, A gold and silver leaf ink painting he created in 1956. The work sold for $412,800 against an estimate of $100,000 to $150,000. (Speaking of Warhol, a painting that sold for $65,000 at a Christie’s auction was one the artist once traded with a chiropractor in exchange for massages.)
Alice Baber’s 1972 painting is even more dramatic at Phillips Auctions Ladder up and downsold for $387,000, more than six times its estimate and the second-highest price at auction. One of the surprises at the Phillips sale was an unusually early-dated sale titled “Modern and Contemporary Art”: a painting from 1878, sleep houseBy Sarah Bernhardt, from the collection of Texas collector Carolyn Farb. It was estimated at $5,000 to $7,000 and sold for $135,450.
