In a tense saleroom with a lot of silent moments and anxious pauses—at times it felt like a courtroom, with all eyes on auctioneer Tom Eddison—Sotheby’s London conducted a slow but steady £46.1 million ($61.1 million) contemporary art sale on Thursday in a full sale room, with a £9.8 million ($12.9 million) Willem de Kooning abstraction earning the top price. The sale carried an overall estimate of £41.7–58.6 million ($55.3–77.8 million); the hammer total of £36.9 million, before the house’s fees, fell shy of the low figure.
It was a trim one-hour sale, with 34 lots, 10 of them bearing guarantees. Three works—by Damien Hirst, Anselm Kiefer, and Leon Kossoff—were withdrawn before the sale. Works by Banksy, Georg Baselitz, Jadé Fadojutimi, Lucian Freud, Gerhard Richter, and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye went unsold. Last year’s equivalent sale totaled £47.6 million ($63.3 million), led by a Francis Bacon that fetched £13 million ($17.5 million).
Sotheby’s sale on Thursday came one night after a somewhat safe but healthy evening at Christie’s that totaled £218.6 million ($289.4 million) across two sales, more than double last year’s total. The sale came during London fair week, the day after stars like Tilda Swinton and Raf Simons were seen streaming into Frieze, where many dealers reported robust sales.
“I would say the market is very cautious,” Ivana Miloradovic, art historian and consultant, told ARTnews at the Sotheby’s sale. Most of the lots, she said, “either underperformed or were at the lower end.”
The sale was led by an untitled Willem de Kooning abstract painting from 1977 that was estimated at £8–12 million ($10.6–15.9 million). Measuring 5 feet wide, it sold within estimate, hammering at £8.2 million, to sell for a total of £9.8 million ($12.9 million). The painting had last come to auction at Sotheby’s New York in 2015, when it fetched $6.1 million.
Coming in second on the night was Gerhard Richter’s 8-foot-wide Abstraktes Bild (1992), which was estimated at £6–8 million ($7.9–10.6 million); it hammered below estimate at £5.4 million, to sell for £6.7 million ($8.9 million) with fees. Thursday night’s seller picked it up at Christie’s London in 2011, paying £3.6 million ($5.7 million at the time).
The Richter was followed by an untitled dark-hued Mark Rothko abstract from 1969 that was estimated for £3–4 million ($4 million to $5.3 million) and hammered at its low estimate to fetch £3.8 million (just shy of $5 million) with fees. It last came to market in 1992 at Christie’s New York, when Thursday’s seller picked it up for $264,000.
Works by Georg Baselitz, David Hockney, Albert Oehlen, and Andy Warhol filled out the top 10, with Baselitz, Hockney, and Warhol all appearing twice.
“British sales on British soil are always joyous,” said Miloradovic, pointing to rousing demand for David Hockney’s 10th—22nd June 2021, Water Lilies in the Pond with Pots of Flowers (2021) and Butterfly Fish (1978) by Michael Andrews (1928–1995). “Everybody knows the artist, the gossip and the history. It was a homey atmosphere.”
Indeed, one of the night’s runaway successes was Andrews’s Butterfly Fish, depicting the titular animal, which hammered at £550,000 on a high estimate of £120,000 for a total with fees of £704,000 ($933,117) after an extended contest, setting a new high for a work on paper by Andrews. The artist is today less well known than his School of London peers such as Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, but he was renowned by his contemporaries: “Mike is so economical,” fellow painter Frank Auerbach once said of Andrews. “He paints only masterpieces.”
Ottilie Windsor, head of contemporary art at Sotheby’s London, echoed Auerbach’s point in a post-sale interview. “The paintings that he did make were often bought as they were being made by a group of collectors who followed his work really closely,” she told ARTnews.” [Those collectors have] never really needed to sell and so we get very, very low supply of his work to the market; when they do come up, they really do very well.”
There were mixed results for the under-50 set, with Louis Fratino’s painting Kissing Couple (2019) bringing a within-estimate £320,000 ($424,144) and Adrian Ghenie’s The Wall (2019) likewise selling within estimate for £640,000 ($848,288). (Fratino currently has a sold-out show at David Zwirner’s London showroom.) At the same time, pieces by Fadojutimi and Yiadom-Boakye went unsold.
Getting 28 lots across the line out of 34 was still a success, Windsor argued. “Any dealer at the [Frieze] fair would be thrilled to sell nearly 30 secondary market lots.” There is both interest and money in the market, she said, “but the market continues to be selective and continues to surprise us with what it’s looking for.”