Demand For Quality


“It was the best object tonight,” said Smatana. “It’s definitely among the top three works Fontana ever made. The color, the composition. It’s perfect all around.”

At many of the evening auctions starting last week, top-quality objects coupled with appropriate estimates produced strong results. On Monday, Christie’s sold Amedeo Modigliani’s painting of a reclining nude woman for $170.4 million, the second-highest price for an artwork at auction, to Chinese billionaire Liu Yiqian. Seven bidders chased the painting, a show of strength in the art market, Christie’s executives said.

“There’s great global demand for great works of art that have rarity, quality and beauty,” Jussi Pylkkanen, Christie’s global president and auctioneer, said after Monday night’s sale.

The auction on Tuesday started with explosive bidding for nine artworks from the collection of the late New York dentist Arthur Kahn and his wife Anita, who died in February. The group included works by Alexander Calder, David Smith and Richard Pousette-Dart. The pieces tallied $47 million, three times the estimate, according to Brett Gorvy, Christie’s global head of postwar and contemporary art.


Calder Recession Proof


Calder’s hanging mobile “Vertical out of Horizontal" went for $9.6 million, more than three times its high estimate of $3 million. At least five bidders competed for the 1948 work. The winner was a client of Christie’s Li.

“Calder is a commodity,” said Paul Gray, director of Richard Gray gallery in Chicago and New York. “Dealers feel confident they can resell it. Collectors love it. Calder has been one recession proof artist over the past 30 years."

The Kahn group included a large-scale jewel-toned painting by Pousette-Dart that sold for $2.6 million, a record for the abstract artist. It was one of seven artist records established during the sale.

Louise Bourgeois’s giant bronze spider, which has been displayed outside Christie’s Rockefeller Center headquarters for the past few weeks, set one of the records. The work, which was backed by Christie’s, fetched $28.2 million, with just one bidder, a telephone client of Loic Gouzer, who was recently promoted to deputy chairman of Christie’s postwar and contemporary department.