– Sotheby’s breaks the bank with the Macklowe collection
The bulimic art auction market in New York has once again broken a record claimed by Sotheby’s: 922 million dollars for the very famous Macklowe collection sold twice, last November and Monday evening.
Posted today at 5:21 p.m.—
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Press visit to the Macklowe collection at Sotheby’s, May 6, 2022. Above is Andy Warhol’s self-portrait, which sold for $18.7 million.
Timothy A. Clary/AFP
Sotheby’s, which moved from London to New York and has been owned since 2019 by Franco-Israeli telecom mogul Patrick Drahi, topped the fall season in November by totaling $676.1 million in sales in a single evening alone. with the first batch of 35 works from this Macklowe collection.
On Monday night, Macklowe’s other 30 plays sold out within 90 minutes for $246.1 million.
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With a “total of 922.2 million dollars”, this makes it “the most expensive collection ever sold at auction”, welcomed Sotheby’s.
It was put on the market in two batches following the divorce of the wealthy couple formed by Harry Macklowe, a real estate developer, and Linda Burg, an honorary administrator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Met) in New York.
Among the successful sales of the evening, the painting “Untitled” by Mark Rothko sold for 48 million dollars, the “Seestück” by Gerhard Richter sold for 30.2 million dollars and the “Self Portrait” by Andy Warhol which reached $18.7 million, according to Sotheby’s.
In November, “The Nose” by Alberto Giacometti, an impressive suspended bronze on which the sculptor had started working in 1947, had been sold for 78.4 million dollars, “N°7”, a minimalist painting by Mark Rothko, 82.4 million and Jackson Pollock’s “Number 17, 1951” sold for $61.1 million.
The art market is doing wonderfully in New York.
The spring sales season began on May 9 at Sotheby’s competitor Christie’s (owned by French wealthy Francois Pinault), which sold a portrait of Marilyn Monroe ‘Shot Sage Blue Marilyn’ by Andy Warhol for 195 millions of dollars.
The most expensive 20th century work of art ever sold at public auction.
Thursday evening, Christie’s had also sold for 831 million dollars of works, including the bronze sculpture “Little dancer of fourteen years old”, by Edgar Degas, part at 41.6 million dollars, the highest ever reached at auction for the French artist.
And the “Raptor”, a skeleton of a Deinonychus antirrhopus dinosaur, made up of 126 fossilized bones and measuring more than three meters long, was sold for 12.4 million dollars.
