Modern Visionaries - The Roger and Josette Vanthournout Collection - Evening Sale

In 2007 Olivier was appointed Head of the London Department, a position he held until 2009. He enjoyed considerable success in this role. In June 2008 the Impressionist Evening sale reached new heights, achieving £144.5m ($285m) thanks to the Miller Collection from Columbus, Indiana - for a long time the highest total for any Impressionist and Modern Art sale in European auction history. In that sale Monet's ‘Nympheas’ sold for £41m ($82m) a world record then not only for Monet, but for any Impressionist painting at auction. He also played a key role in the consignment of single major paintings such as Gauguin's ‘L'homme à la hache’, which sold for the world record price of $40m in New York in November 2006, and Degas' pastel ‘Danseuses à la barre’ which sold for £13.5m ($26.5m) in 2008.

In 2012 Olivier was appointed Deputy Chairman of the department. He has since then been responsible for several major sales such as the Hubertus Wald Charitable Foundation collection from Hamburg, which was a backbone of the London February 2012 evening sales and witnessed several world record prices. In 2014 he was responsible for the sale of the unnamed ‘Modern Masterworks from a Private Swiss Collection’, which included world record masterpieces such as Juan Gris 'La nappe à carreaux' of 1915, which sold for a double world record price of £35m ($57m) as well as Carlo Carra's 'Solitudine' from circa 1917-26, which sold for a record £3m ($5m).

In 2015 Olivier was responsible for the consignment of Picasso's 'Les Femmes d'Alger' of 1955, which sold for $180m, not only beating the previous record price of $108m, but also establishing the world record price for any work of art at auction; he was also responsible for the sale of Mondrian's ‘Composition III’ from 1929, which achieved the new world record of $50m, and the anonymous Belgian collection ‘Reality and Surreality’ which included Bacon's ‘Cardinal Rouge’ and fetched $45m while the total collection sold for $120m (£75m), mostly in February 2015 in London: as well as being responsible for the consignment of the anonymous ‘Figuration and Abstraction: works from a private European collection’, which also sold in February 2015 for £42m ($64m), with Miro’s 1950 ‘Painting (Women, Room, Birds)’ estimated at £4-7m and selling for £15.5 ($25m), a world record for any post-war Miro.

Olivier has been responsible for helping Christie's achieve a dominant position in the Surrealist and Italian 20th Century Art yearly sales in London since their inception in 2000. While Olivier stopped running the Italian sale in 2008, he successfully continues to run ‘The Art of The Surreal sale’ which is world renowned and is the leading sale for such art worldwide and the only one to take place regularly in London every February. As result Christie's holds a 77% market share in that sale format. In 2015 his Surrealist sale achieved a highpoint when Christie’s registered 80% market share against our competitors. That sale at £66.5m ($101m) achieved the highest sold total for any Surrealist sale in auction history.

Tessa is Head of Post War and Contemporary Art London, overseeing the management of the London auction platforms with a focus on the bi annual Evening auctions. Previously Head of the Evening Sale, Tessa has been key in delivering a number of record prices for artists including Daniel Richter and Banksy. Her passion for figurative painting, from Francis Bacon to Lynette Yiadom-Boakye has continued the evolution of the Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Sale platform, bringing the very best artists to the fore in the London market. A career highlight was working on the Jeremy Lancaster Collection, which achieved top prices for Philip Guston and Bridget Riley as well as setting the benchmark for Howard Hodgkin with a selection of works sold that spanned his career. Tessa joined Christie’s in 2013, having graduated from the University of Oxford with a degree in History, gaining a Master’s degree in History of Art from the Courtauld Institute of Art in 2012. Tessa is fluent in Spanish and lives in London.

Nicholas joined Christie's in 1992 and trained as a general valuer, based in London, South Kensington. In the mid-1990s he moved to the Chairman's office to work on house and collection sales, overseeing the two largest house sales carried out by Christie's in Spain and Switzerland in 1998 and 1999. In 2001 Nick was asked to lead Christie's Estates, Appraisals and Valuations departments across Europe with offices in the UK, France, Italy and the Netherlands. During this time his team greatly expanded the valuation activities for Christie's across Europe, Middle East, Russia and India. In 2009 Christie's identified a need to provide greater services to corporate clients and Nicholas was appointed to lead this group alongside his existing responsibilities. In January 2013 he joined the Modern British Art department as a senior director, whilst still maintaining his focus on corporate art collections. Nick has been an auctioneer for Christie's since the late 1990s and regularly takes auctions in London and Italy.