The evening of sales in New York totalled $439.6m, with Basquiat's Versus Medici topping the contemporary art offering at $50.8m and a new record for Leonor Fini
Versus Medici (1982). Image courtesy Sotheby s.
Sotheby’s marathon series of auctions on Wednesday evening felt like something of a return to normalcy, if only because, for the first time in more than a year, there were actually a few dozen collectors present in the New York salesroom.
In keeping with our new reality, the sale was also very much a hybrid affair: auctioneer Oliver Barker beamed in from London and specialists manned phone banks in Hong Kong and London as well as New York.
The auction house packed three separate sales an estate offering, a postwar and contemporary art sale, and an Impressionist and Modern coda into a nearly five-hour marathon. In all, the evening generated $597 million a more than 60 percent increase on its equivalent megasale mid-lockdown last June. (Read our report on the Imp-Mod segment of the sale here.)
After a dismal 2020, auction houses are looking to get back on track.
May 10, 2021
This untitled Keith Haring lot will be on sale at Sotheby s this week. Photo by TIMOTHY A. CLARY / AFP.
So, here we are, on the verge of another major and relatively “normal,” whatever that means these days auction season, as Christie’s and Sotheby’s get ready to sell hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Impressionist, Modern, and contemporary art in the space of a single week. (Phillips’s sale has been pushed to June.)
And despite all that has changed in the past year, some things have remained the same or even shifted back to how they were before the pandemic. After a dismal 2020 for the auction houses, they’re now back on steadier ground, with the low end of the cumulative estimates this season reaching over $1 billion. (Does that ring a bell?)
Sunday, 09 May 2021 06:15 PM MYT
Jean-Michel Basquiat’s 1983 ‘In This Case,’ part of his trilogy of ‘skull’ paintings, is expected to fetch around US$50 million during the virtual auctions. Picture courtesy of Christie’s
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NEW YORK, May 9 Black artists are represented like never before at New York’s spring sales next week after years of being overlooked and underappreciated, with several expected to set new records for their works.
American-born Jean-Michel Basquiat, of Haitian and Puerto Rican descent, becomes the first Black painter to headline both Christie’s and Sotheby’s main auctions, on Tuesday and Wednesday respectively.
May 10, 2021
Thomas Urbain & Peter Hutchison
NEW YORK (AFP) – Black artists are represented like never before at New York’s spring sales next week after years of being overlooked and underappreciated, with several expected to set new records for their works.
American-born Jean-Michel Basquiat, of Haitian and Puerto Rican descent, becomes the first Black painter to headline both Christie’s and Sotheby’s main auctions, on Tuesday and Wednesday.
The 1983
Versus Medici are expected to fetch around USD50 million each during the virtual auctions.
The late Robert Colescott, renowned for expressionist paintings that dealt with Black identity and history, is expected to increase his record tenfold, with his 1975