Sotheby’s London Evening Sale Musters £100m
By reigning in price expectations, the auction house was able to fetch prices above the high estimate for more than half of the lots they sold.
Sotheby's auctions Françoise Gilot's Portrait de Geneviève avec un collier de colombes (1944) at London Evening Sale on 6 March, 2024. Courtesy Sotheby's. Photo: Haydon Perrior.
Sotheby' Modern & Contemporary Evening Auction brought in £99.7 million (U.S. $126.6 million) in London last night. Ninety percent of artworks found buyers.
With today's Modern and Contemporary Day sale yet to take place, the result is shaping up as a modest come down from last year, when the auctions brought in a combined total of £172.6 million ($208.2 million).
Last night's auction was led by Pablo Picasso's Homme à la pipe (1968), which garnered £13.7 million ($17.4 million), one of five works sold for over £5 million—along with paintings by Claude Monet, Paul Signac, Francis Bacon, and Joan Miró.
Across Sotheby's evening and day sales in 2023, five works sold for over £15 million.
Among last night's most noteworthy sales, Françoise Gilot's Portrait de Geneviève avec un collier de colombes (1944) sold for £723,900 ($918,774), four times its estimate. The work was a gift given to Arianna Huffington by the artist in 1986.
New auction records were set for three female artists: Etel Adnan, Takako Yamaguchi, and Rebecca Warren.
Continuing London's spring auctions, Christie's 20th / 21st Century: London Evening Sale commences at 5pm GMT this evening.
The top lots by estimate are René Magritte's L'ami intime (The Intimate Friend) (1958) for £30 million–50 million), David Hockney's luminous California (1965) for around £16 million, and Francis Bacon's moody Landscape near Malabata, Tangier (1963) for £15 million–20 million). —[O]
