Weak Dollar, Record Sales at Sotheby’s London

LONDON—Powered by a trio of £10 million-plus lots, Sotheby’s scored its highest-ever contemporary sale in Europe Wednesday evening, tallying £95,030,000 ($189,423,299). The total number easily eclipsed the previous high, set here in June 2007 at £72.4 million, and erased any doubts about a softening of the market. The final figure was especially impressive in light of the £72–105 million pre-sale estimate.

Fifty-six of the 70 offered lots found buyers, translating to a 20 percent buy-in rate by lot and just 6 percent unsold by value. Three of the 14 buy-ins were works by Chinese artists, indicating the rocket-like rise of that market may have hit its plateau.

Europeans, including those from Russia and the U.K., dominated the sale, accounting for 64 percent of the lots sold. With the dollar registering its lowest-ever value against the surging Euro on the day of the auction, Americans represented a mere 30 percent of the buyers. Asian buyers and “other” made up the rest.

A handful of pictures performed spectacularly well, including Lucio Fontana’s cratered and otherworldly abstraction Concetto Spaziale/La Fine di Dio (1963), which hit a record £10,324,500 ($22,812,322; est. £4–6 million). New York private dealer Philippe Segalot, standing at the back of the packed salesroom, outgunned fierce telephone competition. The sale shattered Fontana’s previous high, set three weeks ago at Christie’s London when Concetto Spaziale, Attesa (1965) made £6,740,500 ($13,405,926).

In similar gangbuster fashion, Gerhard Richter’s photorealist still life cover lot, Kerze (Candle), from 1983, sold to a telephone bidder for a record £7,972,500 ($15,891,584; est. £1.8–2.5 million), nicking the record set at Christie’s London earlier this month, when Zwei Liebespaare (1966) sold for £7,300,500 ($14,519,689). San Francisco dealer Anthony Meier was one of the underbidders.

Meier also chased but underbid on Richter’s powerful large-scale abstraction Struktur (1), from 1989, which went to an anonymous telephone bidder for £4,612,500 ($9,194,096; est. £1.5–2 million). Meier had better luck on his third try, nabbing Richter’s optically charged abstraction Corrugated Iron (1957) for £1,028,500 ($2,047,279; est. £750,000–1 million).

Later in the evening, Segalot continued his uberbidding, taking Andy Warhol’s Three Self-Portraits (1986), a riveting work showing the artist posed in a fright wig and completed barely a year before his untimely death at age 58, for a whopping £11,444,500 ($22,812,322). The trio of 40-by-40-inch paintings was acquired by last night’s consignor during Anthony d’Offay’s exhibition of late Warhols back in 1987, when the freshly minted paintings were selling in the range of $150,000 each, according to a source at Sotheby’s.

There was also tremendous competition for classic, first-rate works, including Malcolm Morley’s postcard-like painting of an ocean liner, Cristoforo Colombo (1965), which realized a record £502,100 ($1,000,836; est. £175–225,000). This painting last came up at auction in November 2001 at Sotheby’s New York, where it was bought in at $320,000.

In an evening full of fireworks, the auction’s most expensive picture, Study of Nude with Figure in a Mirror (1969), Francis Bacon’s gritty nude of Henrietta Moraes, his favorite female model, elicited a single telephone bid of £17.8 million and sold for (with buyer’s premium) £19,956,500 ($39,779,291; est. £18–25 million). Sotheby’s guaranteed the picture beyond its low estimate, and sources in the trade believe the house took a loss in the transaction. Despite the anemic reception, the painting still ranks as the fifth highest Bacon ever to sell at auction.

Remarkably, or so it seems in retrospect, the picture last appeared at auction at Sotheby’s London in December 1992 and failed to sell against an unpublished estimate on request.

Times sure have changed.

“The global hunger for great works of art is here to stay,” said auctioneer Tobias Meyer after the evening’s heady sale. “It’s become a 20th century masterpiece market.”