Following a mixed performance earlier this week, Sotheby’s The Now and contemporary evening auctions last night in New York made a modest $96m ($112m with fees) from 35 lots. That fell below its $102.3m to $150m pre-sale estimate (all estimates are calculated without fees).
Six lots were withdrawn, while five went unsold, for a sell-through rate of 87.5%.
The results are a sharp drop from last year’s equivalent sales, which brought $261.5m ($305.7m with fees) from a larger selection of 64 lots. A Sotheby’s spokesperson notes that despite fewer lots this year, the average value per lot has risen to $3.1m from $2.3m last November, and that “notably, 70% of all works across the evening sales are appearing at auction for the very first time”.
It was indeed a fresh-to-auction lot that commanded the lion’s share of last night’s attention: offered in The Now was the headline grabbing conceptual installation Comedian (2019) by Maurizo Cattelan, which made a staggering $6.2m (with fees), selling to the crypto billionaire and trophy hunter Justin Sun.
The banana provided a necessary energy boost to The Now, which otherwise struggled to match the frenzied pace of past iterations. Highlights from this section include the record-setting sale of Yu Nishimura’s closely cropped portrait Pause (2020), which hammered at $110,000 ($132,000 with fees) against a $70,000 high estimate. Meanwhile, Richard Prince’s Nurse on Trial (2005), a graphic kitsch painting from his Nurse series, may have benefited from directly preceding Cattelan’s banana, netting $6m ($6.7m) against a $5m to $7m estimate.
Ed Ruscha's Georges' Flag (1999)
Courtesy of Sotheby's
In the contemporary sale, three works achieved eight-figure results: De Kooning’s restrained composition Untitled XXV (1982) which made $10m ($10.9m with fees), within its $9m to $12m estimate; Contranuities (1963) by the artist-favourite Stuart Davis, which attracted attention but failed to justify its confident and broad estimate of $12m to $18m, hammering for $10.5m ($12.1m with fees); and the evening’s top lot: Ed Ruscha’s Georges’ Flag (1999), which appeared to resonate with bidders following this month’s divisive US presidential election result.
Depicting the US flag against a fiery red sky, it quickly shot past its $8m to $12m estimate and hammered for $13m ($13.8m with fees), going to a phone bidder via Sotheby's head of contemporary art, David Galperin. The work was last sold at auction in 2005, at Christie’s New York for $1.4m.
It has been a good week for Ruscha—the previous night at Christie's, he achieved a new auction record when Standard Station, Ten-Cent Western Being Torn in Half (1964) sold for $59m ($68.2m with fees).
A second reference to American politics gave another of the evening's strongest performances: a 1992 study by Roy Lichtenstein for his vast 1993 painting of the Oval Office—one of seven works by the artist offered in this sale–which attracted three potential buyers, including one online. It sailed past its $1m to $1.5m estimate to hammer at $3.5m ($4.1m with fees), going to a phone bidder via Sotheby's Europe chairman, Helena Newman.
Jeff Koons, Woman in Tub (1988)
Courtesy of Sotheby's
Perhaps signalling that taste has not entirely departed the collecting class, Jeff Koons’s unabashedly horny ceramic Woman in Tub (1988, est $10m-$15m), consigned from the Barbier-Mueller collection, failed to find a buyer.
Speaking last week, the adviser Megan Fox Kelly noted that while the unsurety of the US presidential race no doubt subdued the amount of high-value lots consigned to the November sales, the election's results are probably too recent to properly impact bidding this week. "People are still waiting to see how this will play out," she told The Art Newspaper. Nonetheless, she notes that certain collectors will be pleased by a Trump win, should his promised tax breaks materialise next year.