Bidding for the work began slowly at $70 million—and never really took off. Competition remained exclusively between Sotheby’s specialists Alexander Bell and Lilija Sitnika, bidding on behalf of clients on the phone.
After a little more than four minutes of back and forth, which included cajoling from the auctioneer Oliver Barker that included the line “I doubt there’s going to be another one coming too soon, you might want to tell them that,” he brought the hammer at a final price of $80 million, which grew to $92.2 million with premiums.
“It’s thin air up there,” says the Sotheby’s Christopher Apostle, who’s head of the department of old master paintings. “I feel very happy—I don’t think we left money on the table, it’s a great result.”
The price exceeds all but a handful of old master sales and is more in line with the spectacular prices achieved for contemporary art. (The $450 million paid for Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi in 2017 is very much an outlier.)
Last January, for instance, Sotheby’s sold a rediscovered drawing by Andrea Mantegna for $11.7 million and a painting of the Madonna by Tiepolo for $17.3 million on the same day; in 2016, Christie’s facilitated the €160 million ($178.4 million at the time) private sale of two Rembrandt portraits, which at the time was a record.
And indeed, ahead of the sale, dealers were anticipating that the work would compare to those by living artists that have historically soared to nine-figure sums.
“It’s something that’s very modern, which can sit next to a Pollock or anything else important—even a Jeff Koons,” says Orsi. “It feels very fresh.”
The buyer of the work was not immediately known.
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.