LONDON — Christie’s kicked off events for Frieze Week with what it said was London’s most valuable auction ever of a private post-war and contemporary art collection.
Sales came to £46.9 million, or $75.3 million, as 43 works were offered from the Essl Collection of contemporary art in Austria. The event featured works by German masters such as Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke, Georg Baselitz, and Martin Kippenberger, as well as international artists such as Cindy Sherman, Frank Stella, and Louise Bourgeois.
The top lot was a Richter 1970 four-panel picture of the sky, “Wolken (Fenster)” or “Clouds (Window).” The large work, a detailed piece of photorealism of the evening sky, made £6.2 million with premium, a price between its hammer-price estimates of £5 million and £7 million.
Another Richter, an abstract titled “Netz,” failed to sell in the public sale against an upper estimate put at £10 million, and was sold afterwards for £5.5 million, Christie’s said.
“Indian With Eagle,” a 1975 portrait by Polke, more than doubled its £2 million top estimate to sell for £5.1 million.
The auction had been estimated to make as much as £56.8 million.
Karlheinz Essl, the founder of Austrian hardware store chain BauMax Holding AG, built up the collection over 50 years.
“Although it is not easy for us to part from these works, I am delighted that Christie’s has found buyers who will enjoy them as much as my wife Agnes and I did,” Karlheinz Essl said in a statement. “We are equally delighted that through the proceeds of this sale, the long-term future of the Essl Museum is now secured.” The gallery, in Klosterneuburg, Vienna, has more than 7,000 artworks.
“In a month of retrospectives of Anselm Kiefer and Sigmar Polke in London, it was great to see outstanding prices achieved for Polke and Baselitz, which confirmed the growing market confidence in German post-war art,” said Francis Outred, chairman and head of post-war and contemporary art at Christie’s.
The week also includes Frieze Art Fair and other sales by Christies, Sotheby’s, Phillips, and Bonhams.
