London: Contemporary Art

Sotheby’s

62 lots offered
£22,008,250 ($38.1 million)
sold total
27 percent unsold by lot
27 percent unsold by value

Phillips de Pury & Company

70 lots offered
£5,031,650 ($8.7 million )
sold total
56 percent unsold by lot
74 percent unsold by value

Christie’s

47 lots offered
£31,978,500 ($55.5 million)
sold total
45 percent unsold by lot
38 percent unsold by value

Andy Warhol Gerhard Richter Francis Bacon Jean-Michel Basquiat Lucio Fontana Marlene Dumas Subodh Gupta Philippe Starck

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The opening round, at Sotheby’s on October 17, was an impressive exercise in brinkmanship. Before the sale, the house convinced sellers to lower reserves, an approach that may have saved some of the evening’s most expensive lots from failure—and the session itself, as the New York dealer Nancy Whyte puts it, from being “a disaster.” Andy Warhol’s guaranteed and appropriately grim 10-panel Skulls, 1976, appeared to benefit from a lowered reserve, going to the New York trader Jose Mugrabi for £4,353,250 ($7.5 million). The hammer price was £1.15 million shy of the low estimate, indicating that Sotheby’s had no appetite for owning the work—not a surprise given that the house has $285.5 million in outstanding guarantees for the rest of the fall season. A second Warhol, Two Gold Mona Lisas, 1980, was bought by the Zurich dealer Andrea Caratsch for £959,650 ($1.7 million), one of only eight lots to make more than $1 million.

Another guaranteed work, Gerhard Richter’s Jerusalem (est. £5–7 million; $8.6–12.1 million), elicited zero interest. The 1995 photo-based portrayal of the ancient city, also the cover lot of the sale, fell flat when a chandelier bid of £3.9 million failed to ignite real bidding. The artist’s color-charged abstraction Abstraktes Bild (Rot), 1991 (est. £3–4 million; $5.2–6.9 million), sold handily—although below its low estimate—to Whyte for £2,841,250 ($4.9 million).

Earlier in the sale, Jenny Saville’s ferocious depiction of a head, Rosetta 2, 2005–06 (est. £350–450,000; $604–776,000), sold for £634,850 ($1.1 million). The large oil on paper was the property of Dawnay Day, a London-based financial-services company that is liquidating some of its assets to pay its debts. The competition for sculpture was livelier. Subodh Gupta’s stainless-steel kitchen-utensil tableau Curry 2 (1), 2005 (est. £250–350,000; $431–604,000), fetched £241,250 ($418,000) from the Swiss collector Georges Marci, who also bought Ravinder Reddy’s gold-leaf and fiberglass Head of Vasundra, 2004 (est. £180–250,000), for  £169,250 ($292,000). “People have more faith in art than in the banks or financial markets,” maintains Marci.

Phillips de Pury & Company wasn’t able to match either Sotheby’s strategy or its successes. Stubborn vendors stuck to their overreaching expectations, making the evening a humiliation for the house. Although the stunning salesroom—furnished with Philippe Starck Plexiglass chairs—was standing room only, the atmosphere was that of a wake.

Someone must have sent the wrong signal to art star Takashi Murakami that his piece would sell. The artist was hard to miss, seated next to his Paris dealer, Emmanuel Perrotin, in the second row, where he witnessed the embarrassing demise of his fantastically surreal sculpture Tongari-kun, 2003–04 (est. £3.5–4.5 million; $6.1–7.8 million), the cover lot, at an imaginary bid of £3.2 million ($5.5 million).

Most bidders appeared to be bottom-fishing. The New York dealer Per Skarstedt, for instance, nabbed Marlene Dumas’s stridently suggestive Cleaning the Pole, 2000 (est. £400–600,000; $692,000–1 million), for £553,250 ($958,100).

“I think it’s just a matter of mood, and the mood couldn’t be worse,” Phillips’s contemporary head, Michael McGinnis, says, explaining the session’s carnage.

The mood was no better at the Christie’s sale the following night. Lucio Fontana’s celestially inspired Concetto spaziale, la fine di Dio, 1963 (estimate on request, in the region of £12 million; $20.8 million), managed to find a buyer but made only £9,001,250 ($15.6 million), and even that seemed to hinge on a single commission bid held by the auctioneer.