Henry Moore’s King and Queen leads Christie’s 20th/21st Century Art sales in London, setting a new world auction record

Text

Over the course of eight minutes, the price climbed from £6 million to £26,345,000, selling to a bidder on the phone with the President of Christie’s Europe Anthea Peers — and a round of applause. The result was more than double the work’s low estimate of £10 million, and eclipsed the artist’s auction record set in 2016 at £24.7 million at Christie’s in London.

The evening’s pace was set early by lots one, two and three: a trio of early works by Lucian Freud. Bella (c. 1983), a charcoal-on-paper portrait of the artist’s daughter, realised £444,500; Lemon (1946-1947), a still life of citrus fruit painted on the Greek island of Poros, formerly in the collection of Simon Sainsbury, fetched £1,331,000; and The Birds of Olivier Larronde (1946), which depicts a pair of caged lovebirds Freud encountered while living in postwar Paris, made £1,016000. Later in the sale, Ib (1990), an impasto portrait of another of Freud’s daughters, Isobel Boyt, made £1,392,000.

Strong results followed for two of the 20th century’s most accomplished female painters, who represented the next two lots. Sonia Delaunay’s lyrical Rythme couleur (1946) made £1,819,000, and Paula Rego’s monumental pastel Dancing Ostriches from Walt Disney’s ‘Fantasia’ (1995), which was created for the Hayward Gallery’s 1995 exhibition Spellbound: Art and Film and formerly in the Saatchi Collection made £1,880,000.

Some of the most spirited bidding, though, was witnessed for Rose Wylie’s almost three-and-a-half-meter-wide Tube Girl (2016), which was offered days after the Royal Academy opened her solo show — the first by a British woman to occupy all the main galleries. Bidding soared past the work’s low estimate of £50,000 to realise £152,400.

More paintings by post-war British artists flourished: Frank Auerbach’s portrait of his muse, Gerda Boehm (1971-73), which was included in his first major retrospective at the Hayward Gallery in 1978, fetched £698,500; and In the Green Room (1984-86), a large abstract canvas by Auerbach’s School of London peer Howard Hodgkin, painted during the months between him representing Britain at the Venice Biennale and winning the Turner Prize, made £1,270,000.

The thread of abstraction ran through the sale, with works from important private collections performing strongly. Painted five years before his death, Wassily Kandinsky’s Le rond rouge (1939) represents a final flourishing of a career that straddled Fauvism, Der Blaue Reiter and the Bauhaus. Last seen in public in 2018, at the end of a 16-year-long loan to the Courtauld Gallery in London, it realised £12,545,000.

Elsewhere, Cy Twombly’s Untitled (Rome) (1961), Jean-Paul Riopelle’s La Forêt (The Forest), 1953, Kazuo Shiraga’s Yagenko (1989) and Lucio Fontana’s Concetto spaziale (1960) each made £4,076,000, £2,368,000, £1,636,000 and £584,200 respectively.

Additional sculptures by 20th-century masters included works by Eduardo Chillida and Alberto Giacometti. Chillida’s knot of forged iron Modulación del espacio III (Modularion of Space III) (1963), which was last seen in public at Documenta III in Kasel in 1964, sold after a fierce battle on the phones for £3,344,000 — more than four times its low estimate of £800,000. Similarly, Giacometti’s compact but intensely worked Buste d’homme sur socle (conceived c. 1947), achieved £1,143,000.

Two works by Gerhard Richter sold for £8,405,000 and £7,600,000. The first, Schober (Haybarn) (1984), is one of the artist’s largest landscapes from the 1980s and helped to establish Richter as Germany’s leading artist. The second, Abstraktes Bild (1991), comes from his celebrated series of abstract works made by applying layers of wet paint to a canvas and then dragging a squeegee across its surface.

Pablo Picasso’s Le peintre et son modèle (1964), a double portrait and tour de force of confident, painterly brushwork in pastel tones, made £8,520,000. And an early mirror painting by Michelangelo Pistoletto, Lei e Lui ­— Maria e Michelangelo (Her and Him — Maria and Michelangelo), 1968, which was a centrepiece of his breakout show at the Arte Povera-pioneering Galleria L’Attico in Rome — made £1,270,000.

Rounding off the night, a group of Impressionist pictures demonstrated the movement’s enduring appeal. Claude Monet’s verdant painting of a Parisian urban oasis Le Parc Monceau (1878) made £6,760,000; Edgar Degas’s pastel of a nude bather Femme sortant du bain (c. 1887-90), which has been owned by the same family for over a century, made £1,880,000; and Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Rochers de l’Estate (1882), created during the weeks he spent painting the arid landscape in the south of France with Paul Cezanne, made £762,000.

Meanwhile, Study for ‘Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose’ (1885), by John Singer Sargent — a close friend of Degas, Monet and Renoir — made £3,466,000. The rare oil on canvas is a preparatory work the landmark painting in Tate Britain’s collection.

The Art of the Surreal

Later in the night, the 25th edition of The Art of the Surreal Evening Sale sold 100 per cent by lot, the 26 works totalling of £42,978,950 / $57,419,877 / €49,210,898, selling 151 per cent of the sale’s low estimate and 54 per cent of lots sold above their high estimate.

René Magritte achieved the top price of the auction with Les grâces naturelles (c. 1961), which has been exhibited at the Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebaek, the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco, and the Fondation Beyeler in Basel. It made £8,520,000.

Four more of his works were on offer in the sale. The surreal landscape La jeunesse illustrée (1937) made £2,307,000; the nude torso La grande marée (1946) made £1,392,000; a portrait in pearls Shéhérazade (c. 1947-48) made £952,500; and a gouache and collage L’esprit et la forme (1961) made £762,000.

One of the biggest draws on the evening was Dorothea Tanning’s Children’s Games (1942). Measuring 23 x 14 centimetres and until only months ago was on long-term loan to the Museum of Art in Dallas, it made £4,686,000 against a low estimate of just £1,000,000, smashing the artist’s auction record set at £2,463,863 in November 2025.

Another highlight was Le devenir de la liberté, painted by the Czech artist Toyen in 1946 after six years in hiding before re-engaging with avant-garde circles. Against a low estimate of £1,200,000, the work sold for at £3,710,000, breaking the artist’s auction record.

Following stellar results for three paintings by Paul Delvaux in March 2025, two works by the artist sustained the trend. The Belgian artist’s nocturnal vision La Ville lunaire (1944) made £4,320,000 — more than double its low estimate of £2,000,000 — while his formal garden filled with partially clothed women, L’Été, made £1,880,000.

Joan Miró’s paintings Peinture (1949), unseen in public since it was shown at the Musée Nationale d'Art Moderne in Paris in 1962, made £4,808,000 against a low estimate of £1,500,000.

Other highlights included Picasso’s Figure (1929), which takes cues from the Surrealists whilst simultaneously experimenting with a new and expressive mode to depict his muse and lover Marie-Thérèse Walter, at £2,612,000 — more than four times its low estimate of £600,000 — and Salvador Dalí’s hallucinatory Catalan landscape in watercolour and ink Le conseil des dieux (c. 1968), which made £304,800, more than double its low estimate of £140,000; and Max Ernst’s Sun over the desert (1925), which made £863,600, almost triple its low estimate of £300,000.

Modern Visionaries — The Roger and Josette Vanthournout Collection

The final auction of the night, Modern Visionaries — The Roger and Josette Vanthournout Collection — Evening Sale, comprised 31 lots — 25 of which were offered at auction for the first time — and realised £35,382,050 / $47,270,419 / €40,512,447, underscoring the demand for great provenance.

One of the most discerning collections to appear on the European market in recent years, it was assembled over six decades by Roger and Josette Vanthournout, and traces the development of modern art across 150 years, from Symbolism and Expressionism through to Minimalism and Abstraction.

The top lot of the sale was achieved by Picasso’s double nude grisaille portrait Nu debout et femmes assises (1939), which was competed for by eight telephone bidders. It made £7,004,000 against a low estimate of £3,000,000.

Text

Looking forward

On 6 March, 76 lots comprise the Vanthournout Collection Day Sale. Highlights include works by Thomas Schütte, Fernando Botero and Yayoi Kusama. Straight after, 175 lots make up the Impressionist and Modern Art Day and Works on Paper Sale, featuring top lots by Marc Chagall, Maximilien Luce and James Ensor.

On 7 March the Post-War and Contemporary Art Day Sale takes place. Of the 133 lots in the sale are standout works by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Georg Baselitz and Günther Förd.

Later that evening, Spellbound: The Hegewisch Collection II is offered. The first part of one of the greatest collections of European prints and drawings assembled in the last 100 years was offered in October 2025, and realised £8,935,720 from 54 lots. Another 91 are now coming to Christie’s, with works on paper spanning Henri Matisse to Albrecht Dürer.

The Post-War and Contemporary Art Online sale has 165 lots and runs until 11 March, and Modern Visionaries: The Roger & Josette Vanthournout Collection – Online Sale includes another 130 lots and runs until 12 March.

Looking further ahead, on 18 March the Modern British and Irish Art Evening Sale leads with with works by Lynn Chadwick, Barbara Hepworth and L.S. Lowry. The Modern British and Irish Art Day Sale takes place on 19 March, whilst Prints and Multiples runs online until the 26 March, and Contemporary Edition: London closes online on 31 March.