antiquesandartireland.com

Andy Warhol’s Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster) sold for $105.4 at Sotheby’s in New York last night. This is a new auction record for a Warhol.  It was the top lot in a contemporary art sale which brought in $394.1 million.  There were 61 lots on offer and 54 were sold, leaving just seven unsold. It brings the total from sales at Christie’s and Sotheby’s over the past two nights to over one billion dollars.  While there are new collectors and museums at these stellar levels it has to be said that investors looking to diversify assets are a major force in a contemporary art market which is growing hotter by the month.

A group of paintings from hedge fund billionaire Steven Cohen made around $77 million.  The group was headed by an abstract painting by Gerhard Richter  entitled A.B. Courbet which sold for $26.5 million. Steven Cohen’s firm has pleaded guilty to securities fraud and agreed to pay $1.8 billion to settle charges of insider trading.

A 24 part work on paper from 1959 entitled Poems to the Sea by Cy Twombly sold for a record $21.7 million; Untitled, Yellow Tar and Feathers by Jean Michel Basquiat made $25,925,000; Warhol’s Liz 1 (Early Coloured Liz) made $20,325,000: By Twos by Barnett Newman made $20,605,000 and Untitled V by Willem de Kooning made $24,805,000.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 14th, 2013 at 8:37 am and is filed under ART, AUCTIONS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.