“Could you speed it up?” Allan Hobart of London's Pyms Gallery asked the auctioneer Andreas Rumbler from the front row, shortly before the hammer fell on his winning $6.7m bid for Henry Moore's Two Piece Reclining Figurine: Points (cast before 1973) (est $7m-$10m) at Christie's Impressionist and Modern sale last night (12 November). “Lot of money on the table,” Hobard added, with some weariness. It was lot 46.
The sale was slow, but a strong cap to a marathon seven-auction fortnight of New York auctions. Of the 59 lots on offer 49 found buyers for a sell-through rate of 83% and a sales total with premiums of $145.5m (est $109m-$157).
The sale lacked in standouts, most of which had presumably been absorbed by Monday's The Artist's Muse Modern and contemporary art sale. The Moore sculpture was the fourth-highest selling lot and carried the highest estimate of the evening, along with Paul Cézanne's Pommes sur un linge (around 1885) which sold for $9.12m (hammer $8m/est. $7m-$10m) the second-highest lot of the evening. The night's top lot, Pablo Picasso's cubist work La Carafe (Bouteille et verre) (1911-1912), had two bidders against a woman in the room, who bought it for $10.4m (hammer $9.2m/est $6m-$9m).
The night's only real surprise came in the first lot of the evening, a charcoal drawing by Henri Matisse Étude pour La Dormeuse (Le Rêve) (1939), which more than tripled its high estimate with five bidders, hammering for $3.5m (est $700,000-$1m). The next lot, a Picasso work on paper titled Homme, Femme et profils (1967), did well too. Dominique Lévy's Emilio Steinberger bought it for $1.1m (hammer $950,000/est $400,000-$600,000), and then left.
The dealer Hugh Gibson of Thomas Gibson Fine Art bid on both those works and won a later lot, Max Pechstein's Drei badende Frauen am Meer (1912) for $1.1m (hammer $900,000/est. $1.2m-$1.8m).
"Christie's put on a very strong sale," Gibson said. "That's what happens when you put together good works and put them at good estimates. Despite the fact that half the room was empty, I think when they add up the totals they're going to be very happy."