The March 2022 evening Sotheby’s auctions in London sold 53 pieces for a total of ￡162 million, but yesterday’s offering was much smaller—”quality above quantity,” according to James Sevier, Sotheby’s European head of contemporary art. He notes that London has always been “the most global of Sotheby’s cities to bid in” and that, like his Christie’s contemporaries, he appears enviably unconcerned by the consequences of Brexit on the market’s high end. Yet yesterday, Asian collectors stepped up to the plate, bidding on more than half of the The Now sale’s pieces and also buying important Modern and contemporary works, including Gerhard Richter’s Abstraktes Bild for ￡20 million.
Kandinsky makes £37m auction record at a procedural but solid Sotheby's London evening sale
Just before the bidding started, any chance that Wednesday’s evening Sotheby’s Modern and Contemporary London sales would feel anything but procedural vanished. Around 20 minutes prior to the entrance of the public, it was announced that the sale’s sole eight figure lot without a guarantee, Edvard Munch’s mammoth Dancing on the Beach (1906-07), would now carry an irrevocable offer.
The four-meter-wide artwork, which had been kept out of Nazi reach in a lonely barn in a Norwegian woodland for 80 years, sold for ￡14.5 million, beating the unusually broad estimate of ￡12 million to ￡20 million. The highest prize for the evening was presented a few lots later. It was being closely watched that Wassily Kandinsky’s Murnau With Church II (1910), a semi-abstract painting that was the focus of a 12-year restitution battle between the Dutch city of Eindhoven and the heirs of two Jewish German collectors who perished in Auschwitz, would almost certainly break the artist’s auction record due to its third-party guarantee. It was accomplished with just one phone bid from the guarantor and captured the mood of the evening: adequate and reachable yet lacking.
Sotheby’s might still take solace in the lackluster results of the Christie’s London sale on Tuesday. And so can the business people who are keeping an eye on these auctions as the first test of the market’s peak this year. The evening was divided into two sales, starting with The Now, a white-glove 20-lot ultra-contemporary affair that made ￡10.9 million (all totals are calculated without fees unless otherwise specified) despite exceeding its high estimate of ￡9.3 million and setting records for seven artists, including Michael Armitage and Miriam Cahn. Following this came the Modern and Contemporary area, which brought in ￡136.9 million from 38 pieces with an 83% sell through rate, very just above its presale estimate of ￡133.1 million to ￡178.3 million. This segment also included some Post-Impressionism.