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Feature · arts Tonight we took the pulse of the market and it is clearly racing
Despite ongoing Covid-19 restrictions, it was almost business as usual at New York s spring auctions this week, with two paintings by Jean-Michel Basquiat fetching $144M among other exhilarating sales.
By Megan C. Hills, CNNUpdated 13th May 2021
Two paintings by Jean-Michel Basquiat fetched a combined $144 million this week, heralding a return to normalcy for some of the world s wealthiest art collectors.
The 1983 painting In This Case sold at Christie s for $93.1 million on Wednesday, becoming the second-most expensive Basquiat work ever to appear at auction, before the painter s confrontational Versus Medici fetched $50.82 million at rival house Sotheby s.
The evening of sales in New York totalled $439.6m, with Basquiat's Versus Medici topping the contemporary art offering at $50.8m and a new record for Leonor Fini
Monet Basquiat and Kusama Brighten Up New York Spring Auctions / /
Results from the major Modern and Contemporary art sales at Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Bonhams’ NY has conveyed a message of optimism to the COVID hit art market. First off, the Collection of the late Dr Teruo Hirose comprised three paintings and eight works on paper, gifted by Yayoi Kusama herself to Dr Hirose, her lifelong friend and doctor whom she consulted in her early years in New York in the 1960s when she was a struggling young artist in need of medical aid. Although the works were expected to go higher they still brought in a total of $15,225,938 at Bonhams’.
Versus Medici (1982). Image courtesy Sotheby s.
Sotheby’s marathon series of auctions on Wednesday evening felt like something of a return to normalcy, if only because, for the first time in more than a year, there were actually a few dozen collectors present in the New York salesroom.
In keeping with our new reality, the sale was also very much a hybrid affair: auctioneer Oliver Barker beamed in from London and specialists manned phone banks in Hong Kong and London as well as New York.
The auction house packed three separate sales an estate offering, a postwar and contemporary art sale, and an Impressionist and Modern coda into a nearly five-hour marathon. In all, the evening generated $597 million a more than 60 percent increase on its equivalent megasale mid-lockdown last June. (Read our report on the Imp-Mod segment of the sale here.)