Impressionist & Modern Art

Impressionist & Modern Art

Christie's

Giacometti's "Grande femme debout II" (1960) sold for a record $27,481,000 at Christie's on May 6.

Christie’s
58 lots offered
$277,276,000 sold total
18 percent unsold by value
24 percent unsold by lot

Sotheby's
52 lots offered
$235,333,000 sold total
21.2 percent unsold by value
10.4 percent unsold by lot

Pablo Picasso Alberto Giacometti Henri Matisse Joan Miro Egon Schiele Auguste Rodin Claude Monet Fernand Leger

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The May 6 Christie’s opener was largely a subdued affair. The audience barely mustered faint applause when Claude Monet’s much ballyhooed Impressionist masterpiece Le pont du chemin de fer à Argenteuil, 1873 (est. on request, about $40 million), consigned by the powerful Nahmad family of art dealers, achieved $41,481,000, a record for the artist and the most expensive work of the week. Even the auctioneer, Christopher Burge, appeared uncharacteristically restrained, perhaps a reflection of the cautious mood in the room.

The Nahmads, believed by some to have negotiated a $40 million guarantee for the painting, had acquired it at Christie’s London 20 years ago for £6,820,000 ($12.4 million) and squirreled it away for this rainy day. Postsale chatter from the trade that the winning offer was really a phantom bid drew a brusque denial from Christie’s. “There’s no smoke on this one,” says the president, Marc Porter. “It sold for the hammer price of $37 million plus premium.”

The session had seemed promising at the outset, when Alberto Giacometti’s Surrealist sculpture Homme (Apollon), 1929 (est. $800,000–1.2 million), sold to the New York dealer Franck Giraud, of Giraud, Pissarro, Ségalot, for a whopping $3,625,000. Several lots later, Egon Schiele’s erotic Liegender Akt mit angezogenem linken Bein (“Resting Nude”), a 1914 pencil on paper (est. $600–900,000), brought $1,777,000 from a phone bidder, who fought for the piece against the New York dealer David Zwirner. The drawing had been consigned by the estate of the Neue Gallery cofounder Serge Sabarsky, also the consignor of the previous lot, Schiele’s nude Weiblicher Torso (“Female Torso”). The 1913 gouache, watercolor and pencil on paper (est. $800,000–1.2 million) turned in a less-impressive performance, going to the London dealer and Schiele aficionado Richard Nagy for $881,000, a relative bargain. Since both works are top-notch and have equally remarkable exhibition histories, the price differential is anomalous, a reflection of the vagaries of the auction process.

Apart from a few pricey casualties, big-ticket items carrying financial guarantees generally fared as expected. Henri Matisse’s vivid but conventional portrait of his favorite model and studio assistant, Lydia Delectorskaya, Portrait au manteau bleu, 1935 (est. on request, about $20 million), went to another phone bidder for $22,441,000. The London dealer Timothy Taylor nabbed Pablo Picasso’s charming (and guaranteed) depiction of his two youngest children at play, Claude et Paloma dessinant, 1954 (est. $7–10 million), for $8,889,000, and a phone bidder bought Joan Miró’s abstract evocation of the Spanish Civil War, La caresse des étoiles, 1938 (est. $12–16 million), for a record $17,065,000. The painting last sold at auction in November 2004 at the same house for $11,767,500.

Sculpture, often the neglected stepsister of painting, more than held its own here. Giacometti’s nearly nine-foot-high reed-thin bronze Grande femme debout II, 1959–60 (est. on request, about $18 million), sold to Andrea Crane, of Gagosian Gallery, for a record $27,481,000. Crane trumped four other bidders, including the Houston dealer Robert McClain, representing a young Houston couple who are assembling a classic 20th-century collection. The Giacometti last sold at auction in May 1987 at the Christie’s New York Baron Lambert single-owner session for a then record $3.6 million.

An auction high was achieved for another sculptor, Auguste Rodin, when a phone bidder bought his 68-inch-high bronze Čve, grand modèle—version sans rocher, conceived in 1881 and cast in 1897 (est. $9–12 million), for $18,969,000. Alan Hobart, of London’s Pyms Gallery, was the underbidder. It last sold at Christie’s New York in November 1999 for a then record $4,842,500.