LONDON — Sotheby’s London season evening opener of Impressionist and Modern art yielded a new record for a rare Joan Miro painting. Yet apart from a few other highlights, the event was rather lackluster. Thirty-three of the 48 lots offered sold for a total of £74,934,850 ($117,505,338), compared to pre-sale expectations of £72,970,000-102,630,000 ($114,424,257-$160,934,103).
The relatively high casualty rate by lot of 31 percent reflected the choosy nature of a market largely uninterested in B-class material. Still, some 15 of the 33 lots that sold made over a million pounds and of those, a full 23 made over a million dollars. That compares to the stronger £96,968,000 ($157,543,910) tally from last June, when 32 of the 35 lots offered sold.
The evening got off to a decent start with lot 1, a small Pablo Picasso colored crayon-on-paper “Les Dejeuners” (1961) that sold to dealer David Nahmad for £337,250 ($528,842) (est. £300-500,000), and sizzled briefly with lot 2, Alexej von Jawlensky’s torrid and vividly colored “Still Life With Flowers and Oranges” (ca. 1909) that drew four bidders and sold to an anonymous telephone bidder for £2,505,250 ($3,928,483) over an estimate of £800,000-1.2 million.
Less riveting was the Claude Monet winter scene, “La Seine a Bougival” (1869), which sold to a lone telephone bidder for £2,393,250 ($3,752,855) (est. £2.2-3.2 million). It was one of two lots carrying a so-called third-party guarantee, with a minimum price guaranteed by a party outside the auction house. The much-traded painting last sold at auction at Christie’s New York in May 2006 for $2,928,000 — not much of an appreciation for return-minded investors.
The evening suffered in part from several bouts of buy-in fever, with auctioneer Henry Wyndham valiantly trying to squeeze out a bid for aggressively estimated material from the easily disinterested salesroom. At one point, early on in the sale, four consecutive lots hit the buy-in bin, including a Camille Pissarro, Edvard Munch, Paul Delvaux, and Fernand Leger.
Luckily, a rather great painting came up next and saved Sotheby’s skin, at least from a publicity perspective. The intensely blue cover lot, Joan Miro's “Peinture (Etoile Bleue),” a dreamy abstraction with rich nuggets of color and form from 1927, shot to a record £23,561,25 ($36,946,396), smashing through the upper end of its estimate range of £15-20 million. It hurdled the mark set by Miro’s “Painting-Poem” (1925), which sold at Christie’s London last February for £16.8 million.
The Sotheby’s picture sold to an anonymous telephone bidder who played a cat-and-mouse game with the bidding increments, leap-frogging at one point, for example, from £17 to £19 million and another time from £19.5 million to the winning hammer bid of £21 million. Tobias Meyer, Sotheby’s worldwide contemporary head and star auctioneer took the bids while Stephane Connery, Sotheby’s former head of private sales and major rainmaker was the underbidder.
“I was having trouble following it myself,” said Connery afterwards, referring to the crazy bidding pattern. He did, however, express great satisfaction at his first auction as a private dealer.
The star Miro last sold to the Nahmad gallery at Aguttes, the Paris auction house, in December 2007 when it made €11,586,520 (est. €5-7 million), beating out underbidders Giraud Pissarro Segalot. It is believed the painting changed hands since then, before it almost tripled in value. The Miro, which earlier this year was exhibited in the Pace Gallery's “Mythology” show in New York, also carried a third-party guarantee.
Asked about the mixed grill of top-class material and lesser offerings, Connery summed up the state of this market, saying, “It’s difficult to get material and there’s very little discretionary selling in this field. If you’re in the B- minus category, it’s much harder [to sell].”
Helena Newman, Sotheby’s chairman of Impressionist and Modern Art, Europe, praised the Miro, noting, “It very much appealed to the taste of today’s global collectors.”
Other big hits in the sale included the late and decidedly brawny Picasso musketeer, “Homme Assis” (1972) that was featured in the famed exhibition in Avignon, shortly after the artist’s death in 1973. It sold to a telephone bidder for £6,201,250 ($9,724,180) (est. £6-9 million).
A pretty and classic Pierre Bonnard, “Nu Debout” of the artist’s muse and wife Marthe, from circa 1931, sold to New York’s Acquavella Galleries for £4,521,250 ($7,089,772) (est. £4.5-5.5 million). “It’s a great picture,” said Nicholas Acquavella as he exited the salesroom, “by a great artist and a great price. It checks all the boxes.”
The market paid close attention to first-rate offerings, including Henry Moore’s poignant bronze, “Mother and Child with Apple” (1956), numbered two from an edition of nine. It sold to the telephone for £3,737,250 ($5,860,382) (est. £1.8-2.8 million). The bronze baby element of the sculpture, cradled by the mother’s left arm, is removable, in case anybody wants to know. The late owner acquired the sculpture from London gallery Arthur Tooth and Sons Ltd. in 1957 for £650, according to Sotheby’s Helena Newman.
Another sculpture, Alberto Giacometti’s petite, 16¼-inch-high bronze lifetime cast, “Femme Debout (Annette)” (ca. 1956) sold to another telephone for an over-estimate total of £2,169,250 ($3,401,601) (est. £800,000-1.2 million).
It’s too soon to tell if the current travails of the Euro and too-big-to-fail status of some Euro Zone countries had anything to do with the evening’s tally. Paintings that appeal to a certain type of taste — call it Russian — had somewhat mixed results, as the ever racy and wildly decorative Kees van Dongen, “Lailla” (1908), featuring a harem-like femme fatale in a veil and little else, sold to a telephone bidder for £3,681,250 ($5,772,568) (est. £3.5-5 million). The work last sold at auction at Christie’s Paris in June 2006 when it made €3,372,000.
“Are we all done?” asked Wyndham to the bank of invisible telephone clients as the bidding slowed. “Is anybody there?”
“There are fewer and fewer highlights,” noted Paris dealer Lionel Pissarro as he exited the salesroom, “and the rest of the market is slow. Still,” cautioned the dealer, “it’s hard to draw conclusions from one sale.”
The evening action resumes on Wednesday at Christie’s Impressionist and Modern sale.
To see highlights of Sotheby's London's Impressionist and Modern sale, click on the slide show.