Highs and lows for modern and contemporary art at Sotheby’s

The delay of over an hour caused by the protracted auction of the Lewis collection, and the change of auctioneer, meant that second catalogue presented by Sotheby’s on the evening of 24 June to capitalise on the momentum generated by that first successful sale.
The general catalogue of Modern and Contemporary Art lost three lots before they were offered, including a large canvas by Peter Doig with an estimate of 10–15 million pounds once the auction had already begun, reducing the total to 40 lots, six of which remained unsold, despite the presence of as many as 18 lots guaranteed by third parties and, therefore, essentially already sold. The guarantees protected only four multi-million-pound lots, but also many works of contemporary art below the one-million-pound threshold. The final result of 97 million pounds falls within the estimate of 77.4–109.7 million, thanks to the top two sales, which accounted for half of the total proceeds.

A total of 40.8 million pounds (including commissions) is due, in fact, for Monet’s classic ‘Water Lilies’ Monet from 1907, which was contested by several bidders up to 35 million, at the midpoint of the estimate of 30–40 million pounds.
This price is in line with the results achieved by works from the same series, usually sold on the New York market, as was the case with this very work as recently as 2022, when it was sold for $56.5 million – over two million more than the new result at the current exchange rate – representing a total loss of 10 million dollars (the seller normally receives the hammer price of approximately 46 million dollars).

A second work by Monet, a sketch depicting his first wife Camille on the beach in 1870, failed to attract any buyers despite an estimate of 7–10 million pounds; it too was returning to auction after being acquired in New York in 2018: works in this field rarely take less than a decade to appreciate in value.

Although it had remained in the same collection for decades, the 1909 work by Kandinsky just exceeded the guaranteed estimate of 4–6 million, settling after a couple of bids at 5.1 million pounds including commission, perhaps partly due to the rather sombre subject matter of the ‘Funeral March’, although Egon Schiele’s 1912 ‘Dead City IV’ – a gloomy view of Krumau – found, on the other hand, attracted bidders who drove the price beyond the estimate to 4.5 million pounds.

The positive, sunny energy emanating from Rothko’s 1959 work on paper with a yellow background, however, saw it easily exceed the guaranteed estimate of 4–6 million to fetch 9 million pounds, following a lengthy bidding war lasting around ten minutes. The popularity of this great master of colour is sky-high, thanks in part to major exhibitions, and to another work on paper – this time in darker tones – which sold at Art Basel for 6.5 million dollars.