20th/21st Century: London Evening Sale achieves £81,980,050 / $107,147,925 / €97,556,260

Cementing its central role in the capital’s Frieze Week season, Christie’s 20th/21st Century: London Evening Sale, held on 9 October 2024, realised £81,980,050 / $107,147,925 / €97,556,260. The result is up 83 per cent on last October’s total of £44,691,420, with sell-through rates of 96 per cent by value and 89 per cent by lot.

Bidders from 23 countries competed for 52 lots across the curated sale, with 50 per cent of buyers coming from Europe, the Middle East and Africa, 28 per cent from the USA and 22 per cent from Asia. Christie’s unique 20/21 programme — showcasing works by modern innovators and contemporary icons — continued to attract new, younger clients, with 23 per cent of buyers being millennials or younger.

Lucian Freud portraits

Topping the bill was Lucian Freud’s painting Ria, Naked Portrait (2006-07). Depicting the art handler Ria Kirby, who met the 83-year-old Freud while installing an exhibition of his work at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London in 2006, the portrait is notable for its thick, impasto surface, which was slowly built up over 2,400 hours of sittings spread across 16 months.

In the same collection since it was purchased from Acquavella Galleries in 2008, it sold to a telephone bidder for £11,810,000.

This was directly followed by a second Freud portrait, Head of a Woman (1992), which sold for £3,428,000. Depicting the artist’s friend Susanna Chancellor, the canvas hung on the wall of Freud’s Kensington house until it was gifted by the artist in 2002.

Jeff Koons’s Balloon Monkey (Blue)

The second highest price of the night was paid for Jeff Koons’s Balloon Monkey (Blue) (2006-13). The monumental sculpture presided over the courtyard of Florence’s Palazzo Strozzi during the artist’s 2021-22 show Shine and had been installed in St James’s Square, adjacent to Christie’s London headquarters, throughout the auction’s preview. Auctioneer Adrien Meyer steered the lot to achieve £7,555,000.

Another sculpture, Annie Morris’s totemic Stack 8, Viridian Green (2021), comfortably eclipsed its low estimate of £120,000 to reach £302,400.

Artist records, Van Gogh and Surrealism

Two artist auction records were broken. The first was for Sarah Sze, whose Spell (2023) — a frenetic mixed-media collage — achieved £756,000, beating her record of $737,500 set at Christie’s in 2020. This was followed by Léon Spilliaert’s Phare sur la digue (1908), which features on the cover of the 2019 monograph on the artist, From the Depths of the Soul. The work sold for £982,800, smashing Spilliaert’s previous record of $661,073, unbroken since 1998.

Elsewhere in the auction, Selbstbildnis (Self-Portrait), an almost four-metre-wide photorealist work from 1980 by the Swiss painter Franz Gertsch, fetched £2,581,000. Its sale coincides with the late artist’s current retrospective at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark.

Coinciding with the exhibition Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers at the National Gallery in London, Head of a Woman with White Cap, painted by the Dutch artist in 1885, sold for £1,855,000, comfortably surpassing its £1,200,000 low estimate.

The saleroom’s appetite for established artists continued, with Richard Prince’s Hurricane Nurse (2004) and Untitled (Cowboy) (1997) achieving £4,184,250 and £2,097,000 respectively, while David Hockney’s More Woldgate Timber, October 13th 2009 (2009) made £4,638,000, and Willem de Kooning’s Untitled XVIII (1986), from the collection of Eric Clapton, reached £3,448,500.

Meanwhile, on the 100th anniversary of André Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto, René Magritte’s enigmatic works Shéhérazade (1947), L’invitée (1956) and Le grand style (1952) sold for £882,000, £1,008,000 and £2,581,000. Le grand style achieved more than double its low estimate of £1,000,000, winning a round of applause and building excitement for the sale of the artist’s oil painting L’empire des lumières (1954), offered in MICA: THE COLLECTION OF MICA ERTEGUN Part I at Christie’s in New York next month.

Black British artists saw strong results on the eve of 1-54 in London — the international fair dedicated to the art of Africa and its diaspora — at Somerset House. Chris Ofili’s Triple Couple (2001-02) sold for £415,800; Jadé Fadojutimi’s Vibe with Me (2021) for £504,000; and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s 11pm Saturday (2011) for £819,000.

Impressionist and Modern Art Works on Paper

The Impressionist and Modern Art Works on Paper sale also concluded on 9 October, bringing in a total of £6,094,368. Selling 91 per cent by lot and 87 per cent by value, it reaffirmed London’s place as a centre of excellence for the category.

The top lot was Pablo Picasso’s Tête de Mousquetaire (1972), a pastel, chalk and ink picture of a musketeer — one of the artist’s iconic late motifs — which sold for £680,400, more than four times its low estimate.

Following a strong result for The Beautiful Girl (1920) in The Art of the Surreal Evening Sale at Christie’s in London in March 2024, another photomontage by the pioneering Dadaist Hannah Höch, Da-Dandy (1919), soared above its £60,000-80,000 estimate to make £277,200.

Other standout lots included Jean François Millet’s Les planteurs de pommes de terre (£441,000), Bernard Buffet’s 1978 work Clown au bonnet vert (£302,400) and Camille Pissarro’s 1886 Petite gardeuse d’oies (£201,600) — all of which achieved at least double their low estimates.

Leading a group of 23 works on paper by Marc Chagall were Les amoureux au bouquet rouge (circa 1982), Bouquet rouge (1978-80) and Rabbin à la Thora (1967), which made £352,800, £277,200 and £189,000 respectively. A further exploration of the artist’s career continues in the online sale Marc Chagall: entre ciel et terre — Oeuvres provenant de la succession de l’artiste, until 22 October 2024.

Christie’s 20th/21st Century sales season continues

On 10 October, a 1906 landscape by Karl Schmidt-Rottluff sold for £554,400, leading the Impressionist and Modern Art Day Sale, which totalled £7,184,520, with a sell-through rate of 77 per cent by lot and 82 per cent by value. The strong showing for German Expressionist artists also saw works by Max Pechstein, Gabriele Münter and Paula Modersohn-Becker selling for within and above their estimates.

Also on 10 October, the Post-War and Contemporary Art Day Sale achieved a total of £12,634,020 with a sell-through rate of 84 per cent by lot and 87 per cent by value, led by a 1985 canvas by Andy Warhol, Vesuvius, which sold for £604,800. This was followed by works by leading contemporary artists including Sean Scully, Ali Banisadr, Tracey Emin and Anselm Kiefer, whose work is also offered in Collection Danute et Alain Mallart: Bruxelles — Paris — Vilnius on 17 October.

Post-War and Contemporary Art Online is open for bidding until 15 October 2024, while the Modern British and Irish Art Evening Sale takes place on 16 October, followed by the Modern British and Irish Art Day Sale on 17 October. At Christie’s in Paris, Collection Danute et Alain Mallart: Bruxelles — Paris — Vilnius takes place on 17 October, followed by Avant-Garde(s) Including Thinking Italian on 18 October and the 20/21 Century Art — Day Sale on 19 October.