SALON

Saturday, May 12, 2012 7:16 PM UTC

NYC spring art auctions abound in records

By

Topics: From the Wires,

NEW YORK (AP) — The city’s spring art auction season was red hot.

The frenzy began with Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” on May 2, when a phone bidder at Sotheby’s plunked down nearly $120 million for the iconic image, earning it the title of most expensive artwork ever sold at auction.

Then, Mark Rothko’s “Orange, Red, Yellow” stole the record for any contemporary artwork at auction when it sold for nearly $87 million at Christie’s on Tuesday.

But it didn’t stop there. Artist records also were shattered at the two auction houses for works by Yves Klein, Jackson Pollock, Gerhard Richter, Alexander Calder, Roy Lichtenstein, Cy Twombly, Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei and others.

The art market remains one of the few flourishing during a difficult economic period. Among the reasons: an expanding global market that includes buyers from Asia, the Middle East and South America, a strong desire by the most knowledgeable collectors to own a top piece by the most recognized artists in the world and the view that art is a sound investment.

“People feel very safe about buying art,” said Nicolai Frahm, a partner with the London-based Frahm Ltd. “You have a huge amount of new buyers coming to the market. If you have money, you want to be a part of buying art. People almost are considered imbeciles if they have money and they’re not buying.”

Christie’s took in a record $616 million during the two-week-long auctions of impressionist, modern and contemporary art. Its evening contemporary art sale alone totaled $388.5 million, a record for any auction in that category. Sotheby’s sales total was nearly $704 million. Its Wednesday sale of the Bacon, Lichtenstein, Warhol and other seminal works brought in $330.6 million.

All the prices include buyer’s premiums.

None of the buyers has been publicly identified, but bidders included collectors from China, Russia, South America, the Middle East, Europe and Australia.

Both auction houses offered works from famous collections — Philadelphia philanthropist and art patron David Pincus at Christie’s and New York financier Theodore Forstmann at Sotheby’s — and pieces that had been absent from the marketplace for decades.

“The reason for these record-breaking sales is, quite simply, the quality of the material,” said Michael Frahm, a contemporary art adviser and Nicolai Frahm’s brother and partner. “The auction houses have managed to find rare pieces by the most renowned artists.”

The sales “demonstrated the tremendous growth in demand for high-quality works and how the top end of the market is moving away from the rest to reach new levels, higher than we have ever witnessed before,” he said.

They included a silver silkscreen image of Elvis Presley by Warhol that fetched $37 million, Lichtenstein’s comic book-inspired “Sleeping Girl” for $44.8 million and 1 ton of handmade porcelain “Sunflower Seeds” by Weiwei, which brought $782,500.

The annual spring auction season was the strongest since the recession hit in 2008.

Experts said that mid-range works of art also performed well but that it was artworks at the top end that accounted for the robust market.

Tobias Meyer, Sotheby’s worldwide head of contemporary art, said the top of the market performed well because of the global demand for masterpieces.

Patricia Berman, chair of the art department at Wellesley College and a director of the Edvard Munch Research Institute in Oslo, Norway, said, “This narrow sector of the art market is robust because of the record number of millionaires and billionaires worldwide, because of the uncertainty of other investment pathways and because of the increasing glamour and cachet of the ownership of contemporary art among newer investors.”

Nicolai Frahm called the sale of the Rothko painting for nearly $87 million “amazing” because “that’s not so far away from the most iconic image (‘The Scream’) ever created in art.”

Even the most whimsical pieces at the sales couldn’t quell buyers’ enthusiasm.

Christie’s catalog entry for a life-size wax likeness of magazine publisher Peter Brant by the artist Urs Fischer said the artwork had 14 wicks that “when lit, turn ‘Untitled (Standing)’ into a giant candle that slowly melts to the floor.”

It was a move that hopefully was not contemplated by the buyer, who paid a record $1.3 million for it.

___

Online: http://www.sothebys.com , http://www.christies.com

More Ula Ilnytzky.

Next Article

Related Stories

More Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

The week in 10 pics

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11
  • Lisa Montgomery embraces her nephew Thursday after a tornado tore apart her home in Cleburne, Texas. The twister killed six people and destroyed entire swaths of the North Texas town.
    Credit: AP/LM Otero

  • Jack McMahon, the defense attorney for abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, speaks outside the Criminal Justice Center Philadelphia Tuesday. His client was convicted of killing three babies in his clinic, and will serve multiple life sentences.
    Credit: AP/Matt Rourke

  • A photo taken Monday captures Vice President Joe Biden's response to a Milwaukee second-grader's innovative proposal to end America's epidemic of gun violence. This guy!
    Credit: AP/Jenny Aicher

  • Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., flanked by a grouper-eyed Michele Bachmann, addresses the IRS' admission that it targeted Tea Party groups in advance of the 2012 election. In an op-ed for CNN Thursday, the Kentucky senator slammed the president for his faux outrage.
    Credit: AP/Molly Riley

  • Ousted IRS chief Steven Miller is sworn in on Capitol Hill Friday. Miller testified before the House Ways and Means Committee on the extra scrutiny the agency gave conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.
    Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite

  • Attorney General Eric Holder pauses as he testifies on Capitol Hill before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday. Holder is under fire, among other things, for the Justice Department's gathering of phone records at the Associated Press.
    Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster

  • O.J. Simpson sits during an evidentiary hearing at Clark County District Court in Las Vegas, Nev., Thursday. Simpson, who is currently serving a nine-to-33-year sentence in state prison for armed robbery and kidnapping, is using a writ of habeas corpus to seek a new trial.
    Credit: AP/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Jeff Scheid

  • Major Tom to ground control: On Sunday astronaut Chris Hadfield recorded the first music video from space, a cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity."
    Credit: AP/NASA/Chris Hadfield

  • When it rains it pours. President Barack Obama speaks during a news conference Thursday with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, inexplicably inspiring an #umbrellagate Twitter meme.
    Credit: AP/Jacquelyn Martin

  • A smoke plume rises high above a road block at the intersection of County A and Ross Road east of Solon Springs, Wis., Tuesday. No injuries were reported, but the the wildfire caused evacuations across northwestern Wisconsin.
    Credit: AP/The Duluth News-Tribune/Clint Austin

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11

Related Videos

Comments are not enabled for this story.

follow salon

Most Read

Popular on Reddit

links from salon.com

From Around the Web

Presented by Scribol
listener_new_rect The Listener: So long, Sookie Stackhouse

Recommendations