Sign that the art market continues to progress despite the economic uncertainties linked to the war in Ukraine and to inflation, five paintings entered the closed club of works sold for more than 100 million dollars at auction during this memorable evening at Rockefeller Center in Manhattan.
The most expensive, “Les Poseuses, Ensemble (small version)” (1888) by Georges Seurat, a painting considered a masterpiece of pointillism, another version of which hangs at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, reached 149, $24 million including fees, Christie’s said. The company did not provide information on the identity of the buyers, a custom for auction houses.
Christie’s, controlled by the Artémis holding company of François Pinault, had announced that the entire amount of the sales would be donated to charities. Despite his falling out with Bill Gates, his partner in the birth of Microsoft in 1975, the American billionaire Paul Allen, had signed his “Giving Pledge” in 2009, pledging to donate the majority of his fortune.
– Multi-talented billionaire –
While only 60 of 150 lots were sold on Wednesday – the rest will be on Thursday – the value of the collection has already surpassed the previous record for the Macklowe collection, named after a wealthy New York couple, which reached 922 million dollars at competitor Sotheby’s in the spring. According to a calculation by AFP, the sale totaled around 1.5 billion dollars.
The billion was exceeded in lot number 32, a sculpture by Alberto Giacometti, Woman of Venice III, sold for 25 million dollars, an almost trivial figure on Wednesday evening, in the crowded auction room of Christie’s.
From the German-American painter-sculptor Max Ernst, whose sculpture “The king playing with the queen” went for $24.3 million, to the American Jasper Johns, one of the few living artists in the collection, whose a “Small False Start” lithograph, sold for 55.35 million, passing through Diego Rivera and Lucian Freud, numerous auction records for artists fell one after another.
This avalanche testifies to the quality of the collection amassed by Paul Allen, a jack-of-all-trades billionaire, who had founded a “pop culture” museum in his hometown of Seattle, and who owned several sports franchises, including the Seattle Seahawks.
– Safe investment –
Thus, after “Les Poseuses” by Georges Seurat, a “Montagne Sainte-Victoire” (1888-1890) by Paul Cézanne, heralding Cubism, reached 137.79 million.
Records were also broken for Vincent Van Gogh, whose “Orchard with Cypresses” sold for $117.1 million, or for Paul Gauguin, whose painting from the Tahitian period, “Maternity II” (1899), is gone to $105.73 million. A work by Gustav Klimt, “Birch Forest”, reached 104.5 million dollars, another record.
With these sales, and that of a portrait of Marilyn Monroe “Shot Sage Blue Marilyn” by Andy Warhol, which left in May for 195 million dollars, the year 2022 should remain as one of the most expensive in history. of the art market.
According to experts from auction houses, art is more than ever a safe investment in the eyes of the very wealthy, despite an uncertain economic context.
“Clients want to diversify their assets, to take advantage of the art and because they know that most works continue to increase in value over time,” explained to AFP, a few days before the sale, the co -president of the Impressionists and Modern Art department at Christie’s, Adrien Meyer.
“There are more billionaires than masterpieces” available on the market, he summed up, and “the demand is very diversified”, with an increasingly strong presence of customers from Asia and the Middle East. .
