The primary lot, a piece by the American conceptual artist Mike Bidlo, “Not Picasso (Bather with Beachball),” estimated at $60,000 to $80,000, went for $1.3 million with charges.
The collector Peter Brant, seated within the third row, purchased the third lot, Francesco Clemente’s “Fourteen Stations, No. XI,” for $1.9 million, over an estimate of $80,000 to $120,000. Then the supplier Larry Gagosian bought Cy Twombly’s blue, inexperienced and purple portray on a wood panel for about $17 million, over the excessive estimate of $15 million.
By comparability, the Marilyn silk-screen — which Rotter just lately referred to as “essentially the most important Twentieth-century portray to return to public sale in a technology” — felt like one thing of an anticlimax. Sure, it set a report, however hypothesis prematurely of the public sale had the portray hovering to as a lot as $400 million. As a substitute, the auctioneer appeared to wring the bids, with the portray in the end going to Gagosian; it was unclear on whose behalf he was bidding.
“Expectation was very, very, very excessive,” the artwork adviser Abigail Asher stated. “It was an extremely wholesome worth, however on the identical time I imagine the customer bought a deal. It’s one of many icons of Twentieth-century artwork.”
Some questioned whether or not the inventory market’s poor efficiency on Monday might need muted the “Marilyn” bidding. The Warhol portray, one in every of 5 in a collection, relies on a promotional picture from the actress’s movie “Niagara,” a part of a collection of “Shot Marilyn” portraits. In 1964, a lady walked into Warhol’s Manufacturing facility studio with a pistol and shot at a stack of 4 Marilyn work. (The canvas up for public sale at Christie’s was not pierced by the bullet.)
The Ammann siblings purchased the work from the media mogul S.I. Newhouse Jr., in 1998; that yr, Newhouse bought Warhol’s “Orange Marilyn” (1964) at Sotheby’s for $17.3 million. After Newhouse’s demise, in 2017, the billionaire hedge-fund supervisor Ken Griffin purchased that work privately for about $200 million.
