Stefan
Wermuth / REUTERS
Sotheby's
employees with Edvard Munch's painting "The Scream," which will be
auctioned Wednesday.
By
Chris Michaud , Reuters
The
spring art sales got off to a solid start at Christie's on Tuesday, with works
by Cezanne and Matisse each selling for $19 million as the auction house moved
$117 million worth of Impressionist and modern art.
The
sales continue on Wednesday at Sotheby's, where the star lot is the
once-in-a-lifetime offering of Edvard Munch's seminal work, "The
Scream." Sotheby's has estimated it at about $80 million, but many in the
art world expect it could soar as high as $150 million, given its fame.
Tuesday's
sale, relatively small at about half the size of typical evening sales of
recent years, easily achieved its pre-sale estimate of $90 million to $130
million, with only three of the 31 lots on offer going unsold.
Christie's
officials said they had chosen to assemble a tightly edited sale, focusing on
top-quality works fresh to the market and in mint condition, and the strategy
appeared to have paid off.
"We're
thrilled. It was a great sale, and we had a marvelous sell-through rate,"
the highest for an Impressionist auction since 2006, said Brooke Lampley, head
of Impressionist and modern art at Christie's New York.
The
result, Lampley added, "was very much what we expected" after
Christie's tried to tailor the sale to the realities of the current art market,
which has recovered solidly after falling in the early days of the financial
crisis.
"It's
an extraordinary situation," she said. "The art market hasn't
correlated to other markets. We see a lot more people choosing to put their
money into art."
Cezanne's
"Card Player," a recently rediscovered watercolor study, and
Matisse's vibrant floral composition "Les Pivoines" were the sale's
top lots, each selling for $19,122,500 including commission.
The
Matisse nearly doubled the estimate, while the Cezanne was in the middle of its
$15 million to $20 million estimate. Estimates do not include commission.
Other
highlights included Picasso's "Le Repos," a small portrait of his
sleeping mistress Marie-Therese Walter, which fetched just under $9.9 million
and easily beat the high estimate of $7 million.
Monet's
landscape "Les demoiselles de Giverny" sold for $9.6 million, but
failed to make its low estimate.
Lampley
noted the sale was marked by "particularly strong American bidding."