Sotheby’s sold two back-to-back modern art evening sales for $391.2 million on Monday evening.
A painting by Piet Mondrian sold for $51 million at the Sotheby’s auctions, setting a new record for the artist. Some of the works offered at Sotheby’s sales on Monday night were held by two historical figures from the New York art scene.
Collectors were drawn to paintings and sculptures from the collection of New York attorney David Solinger, who served as president of the Whitney Museum before his death in 1996. The Solinger sale kicked off the two-pronged event, bringing in $137.9 million.
The second sale included several properties owned by William Paley, a New York media mogul who died in 1990. The proceeds from these works will go toward an endowment fund focused on digital initiatives at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where Paley has been a trustee and benefactor for many years.
The Solinger auction was a white-glove sale, which means that all of the works sold. Many of those works sold for more than their high estimates.
Only 36 works sold in the following 44-lot auction, with some falling short of their low expectations. Twenty-one works came with third-party guarantees and minimum bids secured by auction houses in deals with outside backers to offset financial risk.
“Not every sale can be an Allen,” art adviser Wentworth Beaumont, who attended the sale in person.
Sotheby’s auctioneer Olivier Barker oversaw the two-pronged event, which featured only a few moments of fierce competition. Experts speculated that the tempered energy among participating clients could indicate that the night’s focus—a largely trophy-free sector of the modern art category—is experiencing a prolonged lull in demand post-Covid.
“This was a sign that we are returning to reality,” said Sotheby’s contemporary art specialist Julian Dawes in a press conference following the sale. “In 2016 or 2017, this would have been a wonderful sale.”
The auction began with a small jolt of energy from Jean Arp’s amorphous limestone sculpture Fruit méchant (1936), quickly fading as other lots were auctioned off. It attracted multiple bidders and eventually settled on a $2 million bid, four times its low estimate of $500,000. On the phone with Sotheby’s Americas chairman Lisa Dennison, it sold for $2.4 million to a client. Other, less expensive works by Jean Dubuffet, Pierre Soulages, and Fernand Léger outperformed estimates ranging from $1.5 million to $2 million.
However, Solinger was known for purchasing works by postwar New York artists whom he cultivated as friends before their respective rises to art world fame, and it was these works that dominated this first auction. One was by Willem de Kooning, whose 1950 abstract collage was the top lot in this sale. Bame Fierro, a contemporary specialist at Sotheby’s in New York, made the winning bid of $29 million for the painting. After fees, the total amounted to $33.6 million.
A hand-painted Giacometti sculpture cast in 1948 was the second most expensive work. It was won on a bid of $25 million, against an estimate of $15 million, and is titled Trois hommes qui marchent (grand plateau). It features a cluster of three of the artist’s signature walking man figures. Solinger commissioned the work after meeting the artist at the latter’s Paris studio. A bidder won it in the room after a seven-minute phone battle with Sotheby’s Asia chairman Jen Sua. With fees, it was bought for $30.2 million.
Buyers from Asia also placed bids on an Alexander Calder mobile sculpture and a Joan Miro painting.
Sixteen Black with a Loop (1959), Calder’s all-black mobile, fetched a final price of $8.4 million with fees, more than doubling its $3 million low estimate.
Paley Works raises $47 million for the MoMA Endowment.
Though new artist records were not the focus of Monday night’s accomplishments, a retrospective on Dutch modernist Piet Mondrian, the subject of a recently released biography, and a retrospective at the Fondation Beyeler in Riehen, Switzerland, seemed long overdue.
Leading the second portion of the night, Mondrian’s Composition No. II, a 1930 multicolored grid deriving from the artist’s signature abstract geometric paintings, hammered on a bid of $48 million, going to an Asian bidder. It sold for a record-breaking $51 million with buyer’s fees.
The result barely surpassed the artist’s previous auction record of $50.6 million, set in 2015 at Christie’s New York for his 1929 composition No. III, With Red, Blue, Yellow, and Black. Composition No. II was last auctioned in 1983 when a Japanese collector paid $2.2 million for it.
Work by Henri Rousseau, Joan Miro, Pierre Bonnard, and August Rodin also sold for between $1.4 million and $4.6 million. The grouping fetched a total of $47 million, about $10 million more than the house anticipated.