Christie’s pushed the market to new highs this evening with a record for the most expensive work ever sold at auction: $179.4m for Pablo Picasso’s 1955 canvas, Les Femmes d’Alger (Version ‘O’). The work previously belonged to the New York collectors Victor and Sally Ganz, and had sold for $31.9m at Christie’s in 1997. This time around, it was expected to sell at around $140m, the highest ever pre-sale estimate for a work. It was also guaranteed to sell by Christie’s (though the house had made financial arrangements with a third party to underwrite some of its risk).
In the event, there were still four Christie’s staffers representing bidders for the work at $140m: Brett Gorvy, the global head of postwar art; Ana-Maria Celis, a specialist for the postwar and contemporary art, Loïc Gouzer, international director of postwar and contemporary; and Rebecca Wei, the head of Asia, excluding China. “We’re in new territory, ladies and gentleman,” said auctioneer Jussi Pylkkänen at $152m. The work hammered after an 11-minute bidding war for $160m to Brett Gorvy, which was a world record $179.3m with fees—outstripping the previous $142.4m record for Francis Bacon’s Three Studies of Lucian Freud (1969), which was set at Christie’s in November 2013.
The Picasso canvas was being sold as part of a standalone auction that made $705.9m with 97% of the lots selling (only an untitled Calder mobile from around 1937 failed to find a buyer). The result far surpassed its $667.8m high pre-sale estimate, and set ten new world records with many of the works finding homes in Asia.
The sale, Looking Forward to the Past, featured 35 Modern and contemporary works created between 1902 and 2011, of which 69% were guaranteed to sell, either by Christie’s, third-parties or a combination of both. “They need the guarantees to attract those kinds of masterworks—people don’t want to take the risk at that level,” said dealer Harry Blain as he left the sale. “It was an incredibly impressive auction—there was a lot of expectation and a lot of competition.”
The title of most expensive artist at auction had briefly belonged to Alberto Giacometti, who found a new record this evening. His life-size sculpture, L’homme qui Marche I (1961) had briefly been the world’s most expensive work to sell at auction when it made $104.3m at Sotheby’s London in 2010. This evening, another life-size Giacometti sculpture, L’homme au Doigt (1947) was on the block. The work had been in the same collection since 1970, but its owner clearly waited until the right time to sell. Estimated in excess of $130m, it sold for $141.3m, making a record for a sculpture, despite only having one bidder—Marc Porter, Christie’s chairman of the Americas. The vendor was no doubt happy: this was one of the few major works in the sale without a guarantee, which meant he or she took all of the profit (apart from the auction house commission).
This was the second spin-off auction arranged by Loïc Gouzer, the international director of Christie’s postwar and contemporary department, following the much-hyped “If I Live I’ll See You Tuesday” auction of 35 works that totaled $134.6m last May.
And, it is just the first of three Christie’s sales taking place this week: postwar and contemporary on Wednesday evening and Impressionist and Modern on Thursday. In addition, Sotheby’s and Phillips will hold their contemporary sales this week, tomorrow and Thursday respectively. As he left the auction room, Brett Gorvey said that this evening’s record results were “just the prelude”.