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Silver Liz by Andy Warhol sold for £6,762,150

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Some £500 million-worth of art is to be sold at auction in London’s biggest-ever season of sales in the last week of June 2010.

An icon of Pop Art – Silver Liz by Andy Warhol (1928-1987) – will come up at Christie’s the Post-War and Contemporary Art evening auction on June 30. Painted in 1963  this rare portrait image of actress Elizabeth Taylor  is expected to realise £6 million to £8 million.  (It sold for £6,762,150).

Sotheby’s expects to achieve more than £200 million from their series of sales. Highlights of their Impressionist and Modern art sales on June 22/23 include Edouard Manet’s Self Portrait with a Palette (£20-30 million), Derain’s Arbres à Collioure (see April 28 post on this blog) is estimated at £9-14 million and Henri Matisse’s Odalisques jouant aux dames (£10-15 million). Major School of London artists Lucian Freud, Leon Kossoff and Frank Auerbach will feature at Sotheby’s contemporary sales on June 28-29.

Post war and contemporary artists on offer at Christie’s include Roy Lichtenstein, Andreas Gursky, Gerhard Richter, Jeff Koons, Alexander Calder, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Alighiero Boetti. Three works by Alexander Calder (1898-1976) include Two Fish Tales, 1975, expected to realise £1.2 million to £1.8 million.

Christie’s will offer an exceptional water-lily painting by Claude Monet (1840-1926) at the Impressionist and Modern Art Evening Sale in London on June 23. Nymphéas, 1906, was included in the artist’s historic exhibition of the water-lily series in Paris in 1909 and remained in the ownership of the celebrated Durand-Ruel art dealing family for a number of following decades. Offered at auction from a private collection, it is expected to realise £30 million to £40 million.  (This painting turned out to be the biggest casualty of the sales as it failed to find a buyer and was said to have been over estimated. Despite this the sale set a new record for a London auction at £153 million).

‘Silver Liz’  is on display in the exhibition ‘Andy Warhol. The Early Sixties’ at the Kunstmuseum in Basel, Switzerland to January 23, 2011.

A work by Jean-Michel Basquiat from 1984 entitled Joy was the top lot at the Sotheby’s summer evening sale of contemporary art in Paris on June 2. It was bought by a European private collector for €1,464,750, a figure well above the top estimate of 900,000. The sale achieved a successful total of €9,517,050, a figure well above the pre-sale expectations of €5.1-7.0 million. Sell through rates of 93% by lot and almost 100% by value rank among the highest ever seen at a contemporary sale at Sotheby’s Paris. A remarkable 74% of sold lots realised prices in excess of their high estimate.

Sotheby’s Summer Sales of Impressionist & Modern and Contemporary Art in Paris concluded on the evening of June 3 having brought an outstanding total of €31,332,325.  The Impressionist and Modern sale brought in 17.5 million and the evening and day contemporary art sales brought in a total of 13.8 million.  There were new auction records across the two days for Helena Viera da Silva, Jacques Villeglé and Louis Marcoussis. Four works sold for over one million euro and 14 for over 500,000.

Louise Bourgeois, the world renowned French born New York based sculptor, died on Monday, May 31, 2010. Though 98 she worked up to the end. She died of following a heart attack. Her influential sculptures explored the deepest feelings of women about birth, sexuality and death.

Bourgeois was the first sculptor commissioned for The Unilever Series to celebrate the opening of Tate Modern in 2000. The monumental female spider, Maman, carrying her white marble eggs beneath her, was the work visitors first saw when they entered the vast space of the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern at Bankside in London. Hers was the first new work to be commissioned for the gallery.