A painting by the French giant of impressionism Claude Monet was sold Wednesday evening at auction in New York for nearly $35 million, Sotheby’s announced.
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After a decline in the global art market in 2023, the major auction houses Christie’s and Sotheby’s launched their spring sales on Monday in the American capital of arts and finance, in a rather optimistic climate after good results at London and Paris.
Sotheby’s, which belongs to Franco-Israeli billionaire Patrick Drahi, reported Wednesday evening the sale online, by telephone and at its Manhattan headquarters of around fifty modern art paintings for $235 million.
One of the most expensive canvases, Grindstones in Giverny (1893) by Claude Monet, went “in an eight-minute bidding battle” for $34.8 million, a spokeswoman said.
And a work by British-Mexican artist Leonora Carrington (1917-2011) broke an auction record for the artist with Dagobert’s Distractions sold for $28.5 million to a buyer “in the room after a ten-minute battle.”
This “places Carrington among the five highest-rated female artists, ahead of male surrealists Max Ernst or Salvador Dali,” Sotheby’s argued.
Its competitor Christie’s, owned by the Artémis portfolio company of French billionaire François Pinault, has suffered a cyberattack since last Thursday which disrupted its website where part of the auctions take place. But the company assured that it had “managed” this “technological safety problem”.
During its evening on Tuesday at its prestigious Rockefeller Center headquarters in the heart of Manhattan, Christie’s sold $115 million worth of contemporary art, including part of the collection of a famous American-Cuban art dealer. of Miami who died in February, Rosa de la Cruz.
A painting by the American Jean-Michel Basquiat The Italian Version of Popeye has no Pork in his Diet also sold for 32 million dollars, far from the records of the legendary New York artist who died at the age of 27 in 1988.
Moreover, Basquiat also dominated the two evenings Tuesday and Wednesday at the small Phillips auction house with Untitled (ELMAR)sold for $46.5 million.
Against the backdrop of wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, with fewer Russian buyers in the market, global art auctions reached $14.9 billion in 2023 compared to $16 billion in 2022 ( -14.5%), year of emergence from the pandemic which had shattered all ceilings.
