An oil painting by Amedeo Modigliani, Nu couché (1917-18) became the second most expensive painting ever sold at auction when it went for $170.4m (est. $100m) at Christie's New York last night (9 November). The Wall Street Journal identified the phone buyer as the Chinese billionaire Liu Yiqian and his wife, Wang Wei. (The painting had further Asian interest from the young Korean dealer Hong Gyu Shin who jumped in at $142m.)
The work sold as part of Christie's $491.4m (est. $440m-$532m) The Artist's Muse sale, which merged contemporary and Modern works. Results were also mixed, with 24 of the 34 lots (71% finding buyers). A handful of big-ticket lots failed: Willem de Kooning's Woman (1952-53, est $14m-$18m) and Lucian Freud's portrait of his daughter Bella, Naked Portrait on a Red Sofa (1989-91, est $20m to $30m. Both failed to attract bidders.
"I don't think it was a great picture," the collector Eli Broad said of the Freud after the sale. "And it was so much money!" added his wife Edythe.
A work by Fernand Léger Les constructeurs avec arbre (1949-50), which failed to sell last year at Christie's, was also bought in with no bids (est $12m-$18m).
The third-highest lot of the evening, a rare carved wood sculpture by Paul Gauguin, Thérèse (1902-03) attracted three telephone bidders before selling for $31m (est $18m-$25m). The dealer Andrew Fabricant was the underbidder in the saleroom and said he was "disappointed on many levels because we're not going to get another one like that again, it's perfect." He described the rest of the sale "all over the place".
The art advisor Stephane Connery bought the night's fifth-highest selling lot, a study for Paul Cézanne's The Card Players (1890-96) that sold for $20.9m (est $18m-$25m). He too said the mixed results indicated that the market had grown "a little cooler, a little smarter".
At the press conference after the sale, Brett Gorvy, Christie's chairman and international head of post-war and contemporary art, attributed its unevenness to the "turbulence in the stock market" since August, when the works were being sourced.
Additional reporting by Charlotte Burns