Auctions confirm Paris as the European capital of modern art
The French week ended with Christie's and Sotheby's fetching respectively 92.5 million with four catalogues and 89.7 million with two catalogues
The Paris Art Week from 20 to 26 October, driven by the Art Basel fair and its satellite fairs, also saw the offer of particularly rich auction catalogues, confirming the progressive shift of the market axis in favour of the French capital and to the detriment of London, which nevertheless remains a vital but no longer predominant marketplace as it was before Brexit.
The two main auction houses presented catalogues with different content: while Christie's on the evening of 23 October focused on post-war and Italian art, Sotheby's on the following evening flanked its Modern art catalogue with one dedicated to Surrealism. The results were overall positive for both.
Christie's and Italian art
The total realisation of the four proposed catalogues was €92.5 million, of which €59 million from the evening auction of 23 October alone with 51 lots sold out of 59 in the catalogue, led by Yves Klein's monumental blue work of over 4 metres, 'California (IKB 71)' from 1961, which realised €18.4 million from a third-party guaranteed estimate, a record for the artist in his native country, a work sold in France despite coming from an American private collection.
In addition to Klein, several French post-war artists achieved notable results, such as a work by Pierre Soulage from the early days of his research on blackness in 1960, which fetches close to €2.7 million, and two works by Dubuffet which realised a total of €3.6 million.
The section devoted to Italian art, once the subject of a separate sale in London, realised a total of €9.5m, thanks in part to a new auction record for a museum work executed in Rome in 1959 by Jannis Kounellis, which nearly reached €1.8m, exceeding its guaranteed estimate of €1-1.5m, and several works from the collection of Alessandro Grassi including Mario Schifano's 1978 'Large Italian Equestrian Painting' measuring over two metres which multiplied its estimate of €150-200,000 to half a million with commissions.
An Attesa' by Fontana with four cuts in an unusual bright yellow colour exceeded estimates, fetching close to €1.2 million; good results also for Alighiero Boetti, Gino De Dominicis and contemporary Maurizio Cattelan.
