Do you remember the art auction I wrote to you about last month? The auction for The Collection of David and Peggy Rockefeller: 19th & 20thCentury Art broke the record for the largest single-seller auction ever. Buyers paid $646 million for the paintings from the Rockefeller collection. Kelly Crow reports for The Wall Street Journal:
Before the series began, Christie’s told the Rockefeller family it hoped to get at least $650 million selling off the entire estate, which comprises roughly 1,500 lots. On Tuesday, the house’s sale of 44 paintings and sculptures nearly matched that sum.
Records were broken for household-name artists like Claude Monet —whose 1914-1917 “Water Lilies” once hung along a stairwell of one of the Rockefellers’ four homes—sold to a telephone bidder for $84.7 million after a 14-minute bidding war. Henri Matisse’s 1923 “Reclining Nude with Magnolias,” which hung in their home in Westchester County, sold for $80.8 million, over its $70 million estimate. Xin Li, the deputy chairman of Christie’s Asia, fielded the winning bid for the Matisse.
Records were also broken for Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Eugene Delacroix and Armand Seguin, whose painted screen from 1892-93, “The Delights of Life,” sold to dealer Thomas Seydoux for $7.7 million.
Paul Gauguin’s 1888 aerial view of a crashing “Wave” also sold for $35.2 million, over its $18 million estimate.
After the sale, art adviser and former Christie’s auction executive Doug Woodham said the fact that Mr. Rockefeller—scion of one of the greatest Gilded Age fortunes—owned these works had likely boosted their sale prices by as much as a third.
Read more here.
