Peter Doig’s The Architect’s Home in the Ravine, painted in 1991, was the top lot at Christie’s Post War and Contemporary auction in London tonight. It made £11,282,500 in a sale which brought in £58,099,000. Registered bidders from 42 countries across four continents took part in an auction where 51% of works sold above estimate and 38% were within estimate.
Works that were hotly contested included David Hockney’s Beach Umbrella (1971), which made £3,106,500. Three works by Alexander Calder from the Arthur and Anita Kahn Collection realised a total of £3,439,500 led by Crag with Yellow Boomerang and Red Eggplant (1974), which sold for £1,874,500. Zeitpunkt: Das Massaker von Muenchen (Point of time: The Massacre of Munich) by Joseph Beuys sold for £854,500 and Untitled (1973) by Robert Mangold, made £746,500. Each set a new world record for the artist. The Yves Klein illustrated below, estimated at £8-14 million, failed to sell. Francis Bacon’s Two Figures (1975) sold for £5.4 million. A self portrait conjoined with the figure of George Dyer it was painted in Paris shortly after Dyer’s suicide. It was from the collection of Michael Peppiatt, a leading biographer and curator of Bacon.
Peter Doig – The architect’s home in the ravine.
