An "Abusivo" Evening at Christie’s

Top Five Prices

1. Lucian Freud, Bruce Bernard (1992)
£7,860,000
(est. £4.5-5.5 million)
Anonymous

2. Andy Warhol, Three Marilyns (1962)
£5,620,000

(est. £5-7 million)

European Buyer

3. Francis Bacon, Two Men Working in a Field (1971)
£5,060,000
(est. £5-7 million)
Anonymous

4. Francis Bacon, Landscape with Car (ca. 1945-46)
£4,276,000
(est. £4-6 million)
Doris Ammann

5. Roy Lichtenstein, Still Life with Stretcher, Mirror, Bowl of Fruit (1972)
£4,052,000
(est. £2.5-3.5 million)
Asian Trade

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Only 11 of the 101 lots failed to find buyers in a marathon, but often dull, two-and-a-half hour sale. Fifteen artist records were broken and 17 lots sold for more than a million pounds, while 42 topped the million-dollar mark. More than half of the evening’s lots carried financial guarantees, a calculated risk that paid off handsomely for the hard-charging auction house.

Unfortunately, it was a lousy evening for spectator sport, given the numbing number of lots on sale, as six separate and awkwardly choreographed clusters of private collections hit the block.

Some buyers were galled by the overload of property. “It’s a little bit unacceptable,” said New York trader Jose Mugrabi, who bought Andy Warhol’s Four-Foot Flowers (1964) for £2,596,000 ($5,160,848, est. £2.5-3.5 million), “and a little bit abusivo.” But the long evening didn’t crimp Mugrabi’s buying appetite or stamina—he nabbed two other Warhols and a Christopher Wool painting.

Despite the gripes, the contemporary art market continued to perform in near flawless fashion. The evening action resumes at Sotheby’s on Thursday.

Top Five Prices:

1. Lot 35, Lucian Freud, Bruce Bernard (1992), sold for £7, 860,000 ($15,625,680, est. £4.5-5.5 million)

Freud’s standing and decidedly sober portrait of his close friend became the highest price for any living artist’s work in Europe and second only to Jasper Johns’s Figure 4 (1959), which sold for $17.4 million at Christie’s New York in May. The work easily eclipsed the previous Freud mark set in February 2005 at Christie’s London when Red-haired man in a chair (1962-63) sold for £4,152,000 ($7,703,153). Bernard, the late and noted picture editor and drinking pal of Freud, reportedly avoided modeling for the demanding artist for a long time, fearing it would be too laborious of an undertaking. But it turned out to be a very pleasant project, according to Bernard, with at least half the time filled with “a stream of good gossip, old song lyrics, and jokes.”

London dealer Ivor Braka tried one bid for the portrait but was quickly overtaken by an anonymous bidder who moments earlier nabbed lot 34, Peter Doig’s Figures in Trees (1997-98), for £1.08 million (est. £800,000-1.2 million). Both paintings were part of a larger trove of 20 British works sold by American collectors Elaine and Melvin Merians, which tallied £16,185,600 ($33,429,412).

2. Lot 60, Andy Warhol, Three Marilyns (1962), sold for £5,620,000 ($11,172,560, est. £5-7 million)

One of the Prince of Pop’s iconic figures, this skinny, vertical format composition of the screen goddess, executed in three serial repetitions and set against a turquoise background, is just 43 1/2 inches high and 9 3/8 inches wide. It was one of 16 Warhols offered during the epic evening, three of which failed to sell, shocking some observers who falsely believe Warhol is impregnable to ever-escalating and sky-high expectations.

A telephone bidder, identified by Christie’s as a private European buyer, was the only contender against its secret reserve, offering a hammer winning bid of £5 million before the buyer’s premium (20 percent of the first £500,000 and 12 percent thereafter) was added.

Overall, Europeans accounted for 37 percent of the lots sold, trailed by Americans at 27 percent, UK buyers at 25 percent, Asians at 10 percent, and Middle Eastern buyers at 1 percent.

3. Lot 40, Francis Bacon, Two Men Working in a Field (1971), sold for £5,060,000 ($10,059,280, est. £5-7 million)

Painted in 1971, the rare, outdoor setting of two muscular and impressively distorted men, bent over and raking away on an irrigated field, is full of art-historical associations. The late, great Bacon scholar David Sylvester made a reference to a Raphael cartoon housed in the Victoria & Albert Museum, which was just around the corner from Bacon’s London studio. The artist used to stroll around those grand halls looking at great pictures.

Commercial reception of the generously scaled 78- by 58-inch canvas hasn’t always been strong, as evidenced by its failure to sell at auction back at Sotheby’s New York in May 1982. But times have changed. This time, the work sold to an unidentified buyer bidding from one of the auxiliary rooms adjacent to the main salesroom. The same bidder was the unsuccessful underbidder for the record Lucian Freud. The Bacon was also part of the Merians’ British trove.

4. Lot 69, Francis Bacon, Landscape with Car (ca. 1945-46), sold for £4,276,000 ($8,500,000, est. £4-6 million)

A very early and rare surviving work from the war years, the powerful composition also qualifies as one of the most shopped artworks of the season. The painting was offered this past March at the TEFAF Maastricht art fair at London dealer Thomas Gibson’s stand with a higher asking price. But it found no takers. This may have had something to do with its dark and symbolic imagery, which reprises Hitler’s Mercedes open touring car that has been obsessively documented in film and photographs from countless Nazi rallies.

Looking at the painting, the car seems to be wasting away in some obscure, yet exotic garden, a forgotten relic from a terrible past. Bacon destroyed or abandoned many of his early works and, in fact, left this one behind in the early 1950’s when he abruptly exited one of his London studios following the death of a close friend.

Unlike the other Bacon offered, this work drew competitive bidding with Zurich dealer Doris Ammann of the Thomas Ammann Gallery, who outdueled other bidders from her first row seat.

5. Lot 57, Roy Lichtenstein, Still Life with Stretcher, Mirror, Bowl of Fruit (1972), sold for £4,052,000 ($8,055,376, est. £2.5-3.5 million)

A striking and large-scale painting at 96 by 54 inches, Lichtenstein’s 1972 canvas is a brilliant pastiche of three separate series that occupied the artist’s prolific production following his more famous, comic book, war- and romance-inspired paintings undertaken in the 1960s.

It could be an interior view of the artist’s studio or home, immaculate to the point of perfection. There is no clutter or disorder, just perfectly composed elements, like the neatly arranged bowl of fruit, certainly far from ripening. The machine-like application of Benday dots, uniformly distributed across the starring elements, unifies the painting and makes it wonderfully taut.

A telephone bidder, identified by Christie’s as “Asian Trade,” outgunned a bidder in the front row who leapt to anonymous prominence in February when he bought Peter Doig’s painting White Canoe at Sotheby’s London for a record £5.7 million ($11.2 million).

The mystery underbidder at Christie’s, rumored to be of Russian origin, was very active throughout the sale, winning David Hockney’s large and jazzy With Conversation from 1988 for £602,400 (est. £500,000-700,000).

Getting back to the Lichtenstein, it last appeared at auction in May 1998 at Sotheby’s New York when it sold for $640,500.