Andy Warhol s Elvis 2 Times Courtesy of Sotheby s
Fourteen choice lots from the collection of the fourth generation Texas rancher and storied art patron Anne Marion, who died last year at age 81, fetched $134.4m ($157.2m with fees) at Sotheby’s single-owner sale last night in New York. But Marion’s sophisticated eye seems to have encountered some blind spots in a changing market more attuned to lighter weight, contemporary fare.
The venue was certainly appropriate in that the heiress was married to John L. Marion, the onetime chairman and star auctioneer of Sotheby’s. The collector didn’t just use her inherited fortune to buy art she was the driving patron behind the $65m expansion of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (designed by Tadao Ando) and with her husband John L. Marion, formed the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe New Mexico in 1997.
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
We bring you the inside scoop on who is selling what.
May 13, 2021
Auction houses remain mum about consignors for big ticket lots but we ve got you covered. Photo by Fairfax Media via Getty Images via Getty Images.
The Art Detective is a weekly column by Katya Kazakina for Artnet News Pro that lifts the curtain on what’s really
going on in the art market.
While Sotheby’s won this auction season’s largest collection Texas rancher Anne Marion’s $150 million trove rival Christie’s had to put together its sales more or less lot by lot.
It was difficult. Christie’s had to reel in sellers with aggressive guarantees. One of the its biggest fish was private equity executive Thompson Dean.
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.)