In the wake of the success of the collection of Leonard A. Lauder on Tuesday evening, further exceptional collections were presented for sale in Sotheby’s new home at the Breuer. The “white glove” auction of The Cindy and Jay Pritzker Collection set the tone for the evening and saw Vincent van Gogh’s Piles de romans parisiens et roses dans une verre (Romans parisiens) achieve $62.7m. The excitement carried through into the next sale of some 24 works from ‘Exquisite Corpus’ – a once-in-a-lifetime collection of Surrealist art. Frida Kahlo’s El sueño (La cama) led the offering, selling for $54.7m – an auction record for any work by a woman artist. The single owner auctions were followed in turn by a sale of Modern art, at the heart of which were works from the collections of Matthew and Carolyn Bucksbaum and Geri Brawerman, both of which were 100% sold.
Replete with masterpieces, this evening’s auctions together realized $304.6m, bringing the running total for the week at Sotheby’s to $1.1bn. The results also bring sales of Modern Art at Sotheby’s so far this week to an all-time-high for the category – $796.5m.
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