Thursday, 17 May 2007
Any doubt that a new era has arrived in the contemporary art market was finally erased in New York on Tuesday night when a sale at Sotheby's saw bidders smash one record after another, most spectacularly when works by Mark Rothko and Francis Bacon came under the gavel.
Eliciting a gasp that echoed around the entire art world yesterday, an unidentified bearded bidder raised his paddle to pay $73m (£37m) for a Rothko canvas that had carried a pre-sale estimated price of $40m. It was the most ever paid for a Rothko and indeed for any single post-war artwork at auction.
The previous record for a contemporary piece was $27.1m set only last November. But the Rothko was not the only painting to cross that line. The Bacon canvas, Study from Pope Innocent X, sold for $52.7m, after being estimated to sell for $30m.
"We didn't expect them to sell as well as they did," Tobias Meyer, the auctioneer and head of the contemporary art department for Sotheby's, confessed when it was all over. "We're obviously thrilled with the results," he added, saying they "showed how aggressive and strong the contemporary art market is".
Records were set on Tuesday for a total of 15 artists, dead and living, including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Robert Rauschenberg, Richard Prince, Tom Wesselmann, Hans Hofmann, Morris Louis and Dan Flavin.
For the first time, meanwhile, Sotheby's included roubles in its electronically displayed panel of currency conversions, indicating the growing presence of Russian buyers.
The prices paid "means that there clearly exists a huge interest in this field, and in the icons of contemporary art", commented Anthony Grant, a senior international specialist at Sotheby's. "When we can identify those icons, the sky can be the limit."
Among the few paintings that failed to make their low estimates and were withdrawn from sale were two by Jackson Pollock.
Experts noted that the extraordinary interest in the 1950 Rothko - an abstract oil dominated by a large block of luminous pink and entitled White Center (Yellow, Pink and Lavender on Rose) - may partly have been tied to the identity of the seller, David Rockefeller, philanthropist and chairman emeritus of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Mr Rockefeller bought the painting for $8,500 in 1960 and hung it in a waiting room outside his office when he was chairman of the Chase Manhattan Bank. He had clearly decided to take advantage of the zooming art market to raise new funds which, he has said, will go entirely into his charitable endeavours. His personal worth has been put at $2.4bn.
Sotheby's had invested heavily in the Rothko, reportedly signing a guarantee in advance with Mr Rockefeller to pay him $46m regardless of the outcome of Tuesday's bidding.
It was a good night also for the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, the seller of the untitled 1981 Basquiat. The piece was originally given to the museum by two New York collectors who bought it for $3,150 in the year that it was painted. It was sold on Tuesday to a telephone bidder for an astonishing $14.6m. The museum said it will use the proceeds to broaden its contemporary collection.
One of several paintings by the Scottish-born painter Peter Doig that were purchased by Sotheby's last year from Charles Saatchi was also put under the hammer. The work, The Architect's Home in the Ravine (1991), was estimated at between $1.2m and $1.8m and went to a bidder on the telephone for $3.6m.
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