It was the launch of the big auction season. Christie’s Rockefeller Center salesroom was thronged by dealers and collectors from around the world hoping for the best but not expecting much. The results were not really helped by a sale too big with estimates, which were too high. Here are the highlights of the disappointing auction as reported by The New York Times:
- The auction house managed to sell $140.7 million worth of art, but that was way below the sale’s $211.9 million to $304.3 million estimate. Of the 82 works on offer, 31 did not sell like Giacometti’s ‘Femme de Venise’ sculptures conceived in 1956 and cast a year later was estimated to bring $10 million to $15 million.
- The auction’s star work, Degas’s ‘Young Dancer at 14’, executed in wax around 1879 to 1881 and cast posthumously, failed to sell. At least eight such sculptures have been on the market over the past 15 years, and this one had been for sale privately for the last year. Its aggressive $25 million to $35 million estimate did no good.
- Surrealist art is where taste is right now, and the evening’s top seller was Max Ernst’s ‘The Stolen Mirror’, painted in the US in 1941, shortly after Ernst’s escape from Vichy-controlled France. A fantastical fairy tale landscape that was expected to bring $4 million to $6 million, it ended up selling to a telephone bidder for $16.3 million, a record price for the artist at auction.
- The sale included a group of paintings by Magritte, but only some sold, and not for high prices. Even the magic of Picasso could not tempt collectors. A 1939 painting of a wide-eyed Dora Maar, the artist’s mistress of the time, expected to fetch $12 million to $18 million, failed to sell. So did a portrait of another of the artist’s lovers, ‘Femme Endormie’ from 1935.
- The evening’s results came as little surprise to seasoned dealers. “It was a big sale for the market to digest,” a London dealer analyzed. “The uncertain economy certainly did have an effect.”
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