Sotheby's bounced back from a disappointing auction of art owned by its founder Alfred Taubman with an Impressionist and Modern evening sale that totalled $306.7m (est. 275.6m-369.2m) last night (5 November).
Only 11 of the 47 lots on offer failed to find buyers for a 93% sell-through rate made more impressive by the fact that just one of the lots carried a guarantee, this compared to the prior evening's Taubman sale, which was completely guaranteed. Between the Taubman day sale and last night's evening sale, Sotheby's brought in $575.8m over 24 hours, besting the $500m it had reportedly paid for the Taubman collection.
The top lot of the evening came from the collection of the billionaire industrialist William I. Koch, Pablo Picasso's La Gommeuse (1901), which carried a second painting on its reverse and set a new record for the artist's Blue Period when it sold for $67m (est. $60m). William Koch could not be seen in the sale's audience, but his twin brother, the political donor David, sat in the front row.
"Sixty million dollars?" David Koch said upon exiting. "I think he's probably pretty pleased with that. But I don't know." One doesn't usually see David at auctions, though he said he had bought an Amedeo Modigliani at Sotheby's a few years back. Was he still happy with it? "You bet!"
The night was carried by low-key lots that still exceeded their high estimates, such as James Ensor's Les Poissardes melancoliques (1892), which sold for $7m (est. $3m-$5m) and Vincent Van Gogh's monstrous baby portrait Le bébé Marcel Roulin (1888), which sold for $7.6m (est. $3.5m-$5m), both from the collection of Louis and Evelyn Franck, and both with at least three bidders each.
Van Gogh has been an important area of focus for Sotheby's in recent years ("With your next Van Gogh, you know who to call," Sotheby’s vice chairman for the Americas David Norman joked at the press conference after the sale.) Van Gogh also represented the second-highest selling lot of the evening, Paysage sous un ciel mouvementé (1889), which sold for $54 million (est. $50m-$70m), also from the Franck collection.