Driven by high-wattage works by Paul Gauguin and Edvard Munch, the global art market continued to reach higher ground in London with Sotheby’s sizzling £69.6 million/$120.2 million Impressionist and Modern evening sale.

It eclipsed Sotheby’s previous high for a London auction in this category, set back in November 1989 at the height of the last art boom. The overall tally also nicked the pre-sale high estimate of £68.9 million.

Seven artist records were set, and 34 of the 73 lots offered fetched over $1 million. Twenty failed to sell, including a guaranteed Claude Monet painting, Waterloo Bridge.

Top Five Lots:
 
1. Lot 42–Paul Gauguin, Deux Femmes or La Chevelure Fleurie; Sold for:  £12,328,000/$21,574,000 (est. £11-14 million)

Painted in 1902, just a year before the artist’s death, the Tahitian setting, the flower-strewn hair of the native women and the lush background elements of this painting evoke an earlier epoch in the artist’s storied career. This example, though rare and bordering on the great, is rather flat and lifeless compared to other, earlier Tahitian works in his oeuvre. The price may have gone higher had the picture been fresh to the market. It had been recently offered without success by a prominent New York gallery before hitting the auction block. It sold to an anonymous bidder who out-gunned international art trader David Nahmad.

2. Lot 34–Edvard Munch, Summer Day; Sold for: £6,168,000/$10,794,000 (est. £2.5-3.5 million)

Part of a rare trove of Munch works assembled by the late Norwegian shipping magnate and philanthropist Thomas Olsen, who supported the artist throughout his career, this masterwork from 1903-04 fetched a record price. The mural-sized oil on canvas, originally commissioned for a children’s nursery, depicts rather shadowy figures promenading by a beautiful and sunny seaside setting.
 
The Munch paintings have a great back story in that Olsen managed to acquire some of them and successfully hide them from the Nazis during the Second World War after Munch’s work was declared “Entartete kunst” (degenerate art) by Hitler.

In fact, this example was formerly owned by Nazi general Hermann Goering after it was stripped from a German museum.

The underbidder was Agnes Husslein, the outgoing director of theMuseum der Moderne in Salzburg, who was bidding on behalf of an anonymous client.

Husslein–and you’re reading it here first–was more successful with other Munch lots.

3. Lot 48–Joan Miro, L’Oiseau au Plumage Deploye Vole Vers L’Arbre Argente; Sold for: £5,160,000/$9,030,000
(est. £ 4.5-6.5 million)

Large, jaunty and downright dazzling, this rather late example from 1953 was included in the Museum of Modern Art’s Miro retrospective in 1993. With its poetic title and symbol laden imagery, the painting also has a touch of the New York-bred Abstract Expressionism that Miro witnessed first hand in 1947–an experience that was said to be like a blow to the solar plexus.

International art trader David Nahmad was the underbidder.

Like the Gauguin, the picture had been shopped around prior to its consignment to auction. It last appeared on the block at Sotheby’s New York in November 1989 when it made $9,350,000, a few hundred thousand dollars more than what it fetched on Tuesday evening. You might say it’s a swell picture, but it proved to be a lousy investment.

4. Lot 31–Edvard Munch, Self-Portrait Against Two-Colored Background; Sold for: £3,592,000/$6,286,000  (est.£ 2-3 million)

Munch painted authoritative self-portraits in an almost diary-like style throughout his long and angst-ridden career. This one, from circa 1904, is boldly modern with an abstract and heavily brush-stroked, two-tone background.

Outfitted in a black jacket, Munch is standingin three-quarter profile, the dark color of his jacket hiding unknown hidden turmoil.

It was bought by outgoing Salzburg museum director Agnes Hussleinbidding on behalf of an anonymous buyer. Husslein also nabbed the other Munch self-portrait entry from the Olsen grouping for another client: Self-Portrait with Spanish Flu [lot 37] from 1918 (est. £750,000-1 million) that sold for £1,688,000.

Buttonholed as she dashed out of the packed salesroom, Husslein declined to name or otherwise identify the entities she bid on behalf of, even declining to say whether it was an individual or museum. ”I was requested to keep it totally secretive.”

5. Lot 55–Pablo Picasso, Homme à la Pipe; Sold for: £3,144,000/$5,502.000 (est. £2.8-3.8 million)

Representing his last great series, the so-called Musketeers are considered to be disguised depictions of the aging artist, attired in swaggering vestments and usually armed with a sword.

This jaunty example from October 1968, when Picasso was in his late 80s, underscores how well he disguised and reinvented his last years.

The picture last sold in May 1979 in New York at the old Sotheby Parke Bernet (the forerunner of Sotheby’s New York) for $140,000, no doubt, a handsome price at the time. The result certainly proves the old Warren Buffet stock market mantra of "buy and hold.”

Hottest Lot:

Lot 6–Max Liebermann, Blumenstauden or Flowers in front of the Gardener’s House to the north; Sold for: £2,136,000/$3,738000 (est. £600-900,000)

This 1928 sleeper entry from the Germanand Austrian art section of the auction underscored the market hunger for fresh, rare and highly rated works.

The lush painting depicts the artist’s beloved garden at his villain Berlin where he spent summers during the last decades of his life. It’s a kind of Monet-like Giverny, in terms of the artist’s obsession with his garden and plein air painting style.

The picture has been in the same family since 1931. 

Comments from the Crowd:

“I could not get the Gauguin or the Miro,” said international art trader David Nahmad, “but if they were fresh to the market, I could have gone much higher. Aquavella Galleries in New York offered them to everybody.”

“I have no idea where the paintings are going,” said Fred Olsen, the son and heir of the storied Munch collector who consigned the eight Munchs to Sotheby’s, “and I don’t care to say which one I’ll miss most.”

“When you’re seeing prices in excess of $3 million for late Chagalls,” said private dealer Chris Eykyn of New York’s Eykyn Maclean, who bought the Otto Dix Self-Portrait by the Mirror with Model [lot 12] from 1926 for £198,400, “it does make you do a double-take where the market is today.”