Over three evenings and five auctions, Christie's and Sotheby's brought in $ 1.29 billion: the prestigious New York evening auctions with modernism and contemporaries seemed almost to have returned to their old style.
Much conservative estimates resulted in prices well above the estimates.
Christie's newly launched “21st Century Evening Sale” of art from the 1980s fetched $ 210.5 million with 37 of 39 works on offer.
Sixteen factories were backed up with upfront sales guarantees, most of them funded by a third party.
North American collectors secured 57 percent of the offer, and 24 percent went to the Asia-Pacific region.
Two days later, sales of the "20th Century Evening Sale" at Christie's were $ 481.1 million, and 49 of fifty lots were brokered.
A brilliant start
The evening at Sotheby's, with three back-to-back auctions, turned into a five-hour marathon that delivered a 93 percent sales rate. The contemporary auction grossed $ 218.3 million. Of the 32 lots on offer, nine were backed by guarantees and all lots were sold; however, two high-priced works were withdrawn shortly before the auction. The separately brokered estate of the Texan collector Anne Windfohr Marion achieved 157.2 million with fourteen of the eighteen works on offer. At the Impressionist and Modern Art Evening Sale, 31 lots out of 33 brought in $ 221.3 million. Fourteen works were guaranteed, twelve of which were externally financed. The three Sotheby's evening auctions brought in 597 million:64 percent more than the corresponding date with Modernism and Contemporaries in June 2020. Eleven records were set and eighteen works sold for more than ten million dollars (including buyer's premium).
The “21st Century Evening Sale” at Christie's kicked off with a brilliant start. At least six interested parties from Asia and the United States vied for Basquiat's low-priced skull on a red background, "In This Case," from 1983, for which more than fifty million dollars were expected. The hammer fell at $ 81 million, the second highest auction hammer price ever for the artist. “In This Case” was last called up at Sotheby's in 2002, when it achieved $ 999,500 with a premium. The most expensive basquiat remains another skull, which the Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa bought at Sotheby's in 2017 for 110.5 million dollars.
The second most expensive piece of the auction at Christie's was a package of nine “CryptoPunks”, the first NFTs (non-fungible tokens) in an evening auction. The pixel portraits produced by Larva Labs in 2017 were able to double their lower estimate with a hammer price of 14.5 million dollars (7/9 million). Martin Kippenberger's "Martin, off to the corner and ashamed" set a record price for a sculpture by the artist at eight million (10/15 million). There were also records for the Afro-American artists Nina Chanel Abney and Jordan Casteel as well as for Lynette Yiadom-Boakye.