Remarkably, given the current resistance to boom prices, Dude Ranch Nurse #2, 2002–03 (est. £2.8–3.2 million; $4.8–5.5 million), a Richard Prince painting that last sold in 2007 for $2,504,000, fetched £3,177,250 ($5.5 million) from a phone bidder. But the sale sounded a steady drumroll of buy-ins, two Gerhard Richter abstractions, a Jean-Michel Basquiat from 1984 and a couple of Warhols fell unsold. Rejection resounded most loudly when Francis Bacon’s Portrait of  Henrietta Moraes, 1969 (est. £5.5–7.5 million; $11–14 million), elicited just a single bid, from the London dealer Ivor Braka, before dying at £4 million ($7 million). It was an astounding failure, given Bacon’s recent extraordinary performance at auction—and in the artist’s native London, no less.

“Obviously, when we set the estimates three months ago, the world was in a different place,” says the Christie’s London postwar and contemporary department head, Pilar Ordovas.  "London: Contemporary Art" originally appeared in the December 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's December 2008 Table of Contents.