[2Wycked]

A Picasso painting breaks record for most expensive artwork sold at auction:

Quote:

A painting by Pablo Picasso has set a new world record for the most expensive artwork to be sold at auction after reaching $179m (£115m) in New York.

Women of Algiers (Version O) had been expected to exceed $140m before the auction but the final price far exceeded those estimates in a sale at Christie’s auction house at a time when collectors’ appetite for masterpieces of impressionist, modern and contemporary art is increasing.

On Monday night, several bidders competing via telephone drove the winning bid to $160m, for a final price of $179,365,000 including Christie’s commission of just over 12%.

Previously the most expensive work sold at auction was Francis Bacon’s triptych Three Studies of Lucian Freud, which sold for $142.4m at Christie’s in November 2013.

Experts say the prices are driven by artworks’ investment value and by wealthy new and established collectors seeking out the very best works.

“I don’t really see an end to it, unless interest rates drop sharply, which I don’t see happening in the near future,” Manhattan dealer Richard Feigen said.

Picasso’s work is a vibrant, multi-hued painting featuring a scantily attired woman amid smaller nudes. The evening sale also featured Alberto Giacometti’s life-size sculpture Pointing Man which reached estimated $141.3m, earning it the title of most expensive sculpture sold at auction.

Impressionist and modern artworks continue to corner the market because “they are beautiful, accessible and a proven value,” said Sarah Lichtman, a professor of design history and curatorial studies at the New School. “Prices for works from these periods only seem to go up each auction cycle and the reputations of the artists become further enshrined,” she said. “Today the works epitomise the conservative, moneyed establishment.”

Women of Algiers, once owned by the American collectors Victor and Sally Ganz, was inspired by Picasso’s fascination with the 19th-century French artist Eugène Delacroix. It is part of a 15-work series Picasso created in 1954-1955 designated with the letters A to O. It has appeared in several major museum retrospectives of the artist.

Overall, 34 of 35 lots sold at Monday’s auction for a total of $706 million.

Wrapping my mind around paying such an exhorbitant sum for artwork is beyond my meager comprehension.

Here is a link to the 10 most expensive paintings ever sold. Apparently, Gauguin's When Will You Marry has fetched the highest price on the market:



I don't know much about art dealing, but this sort of exchange sounds extraordinary to me. Here is the Guardian's explanation:

Quote:

Pablo Picasso’s 1955 painting Les Femmes d’Alger (Version O) is such a remarkable and important masterpiece that it could maintain the world record auction price for at least a decade, the auctioneer who sold it has predicted.

There were whoops and whistles in the New York saleroom of Christie’s on Monday evening after Jussi Pylkkänen put down his gavel at $160m. Including commission that means it sold for $179, 365,000 (£115m), easily beating the previous record of $142m for a Francis Bacon triptych.

It had been a dramatic 11 and half minutes in the Rockefeller Center auction room. At $151m Pylkkänen remarked: “We’re in new territory.” At $160m he declared: “Brett, it’s yours. Sold.”

The Brett in question was Brett Gorvey, the South African-born Briton who is Christie’s New York-based international head of postwar and contemporary art. He was bidding on behalf of an unknown and clearly stupendously rich buyer.

Pylkkänen said afterwards that it was no surprise that such a work, by “the Mozart of 20th-century painting”, should sell for a world record price. “It will be fascinating to see for how long this Picasso will hold the world record,” he said. “It could be a decade. It could be longer than that. We really have witnessed a piece of not just art history, but cultural history at Christie’s.”

The price is staggering in a way, double the annual income of, for example, the entire National Gallery. But it was not a surprise to the auction house.

Before the sale Christie’s deputy chairman, Olivier Camu, explained to the Guardian the rationale for giving it one of the highest estimates in auction history.

“It is a sort of Gesamtkunstwerk and the more you read and look at it and think about it, the more you discover.

“It is just amazing, it is extraordinary and so the estimate follows naturally from that. $140m? Why not?”

In Camu’s opinion, there were few Picassos which had a comparable importance. There is Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, the 1907 Cubist painting that fundamentally changed art and is a star attraction in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and there is Guernica, his vast Spanish civil war history painting which is in the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid.

“This is the most important Picasso after the war,” said Camu.

One reason for that is because it is so full of art historical references. There is perspective in one half, with homage to Delacroix and Velazquez, and on the left hand side there is Cubism, his muse Jacqueline Roque and references to his great friend and competitor Matisse, whose death in 1954 inspired him to make the painting in the first place.

The Picasso was one of 10 record breakers on Monday night. They included Giacometti’s life size L’Homme au Doigt (Pointing Man) which set a new record price for a sculpture when it sold for $141.3m (£90.7m); and a canoe painting by the British artist Peter Doig which sold for a record $26m (£16.6m). Other artist records were achieved for Robert Delaunay, Cady Noland, Jean Dubuffet, Diane Arbus, Jean-Michel Basquiat, René Magritte and Chaim Soutine.

In total the Monday night sale on the Avenue of the Americas brought in $705.9m.

The boiling art market is being driven by a growing number of extraordinarily rich buyers who can contemplate spending more than $100m on a work of art.

Pylkkänen said: “We have entered a new era of the art market where collectors from all parts of the world compete for the very best across categories, generating record prices at levels we have never seen before.”

The buyers are convinced of the sound investment value of the works and the prices are encouraging owners of premium works that now is the time to sell. One dealer, Richard Feigen, said: “I don’t really see an end to it, unless interest rates drop sharply, which I don’t see happening in the near future.”

Sarah Lichtman, a professor of design history and curatorial studies at The New School, agreed. “I think we will continue to see the financiers seeking these works out as they would a blue-chip company that pays reliable dividends for years to come,” she said.

The prices are also being stoked by a rising number of super-rich Chinese buyers. Last week it was revealed that the buyer at Sotheby’s of Picasso’s Femme au Chignon dans un Fauteuil ($29.9m), which belonged to Hollywood film mogul Samuel Goldwyn Sr, was Chinese film mogul Wang Zhongjun, chairman and co-founder of Huayi Brothers media group.

The buyer of Monet’s Le Bassin aux Nymphéas, les Rosiers for $20.41m, meanwhile, was China’s Dalian Wanda Group.