Sotheby’s first night of marquee auctions in New York was a three-hour double-header on May 16. First up: 15 lots from the collection of Mo Ostin, a music industry executive who died last year. The group (along with the lower value lots offered at a day sale) was auctioned off by Laura Paulson, director of Gagosian Art Advisory. The estate waived a guarantee, preferring to maximize its profits through the hardened hammer mechanism, i.e. sharing the auction house’s buyer’s premium. Shortly before the actual sale, four lots were irrevocably auctioned. Only one lot did not sell.
Below is the story in numbers…
Collection Mo Ostin
- Total sales after fees: $123.7 million
- Lots sold (including guaranteed lots): 14
- Lots offered before withdrawals: 15
- Lots withdrawn Presale: 0
- Lots purchased: 1
- Sale rate including withdrawals: 93.3%
- Sale rate excluding withdrawals: 93.3%
- Total Hammer: $104.5 million
- Low pre-sale estimate before withdrawals: $103.3 million
- Hammer Total vs Presale Low Estimate: +$1.2 million
- Total low estimate of withdrawn batches: $0
- Total Low Estimate of Guaranteed Lots: $13 million (12.6% of total pre-sale low estimate)
- Lots with house guarantees: 0
- Total low estimate of guaranteed third-party prizes: $13 million (12.6% of total pre-sale estimate)
- Lots with third-party guarantees: 4
- Top rated seller: René Magritte, The Empire of Lights (1951), hammered in at $36.5 million (or $42.3 million after costs)
Gustave Klimt, Insel im Attersee (c. 1901–2). With an unpublished estimate, it sold for $53.2 million. Courtesy of Sotheby’s.
Next is the regular evening auction of modern art, led by a landscape by Gustav Klimt, an Edward Hopper painting alienated from the Whitney Museum of American Art as well as, bizarrely, a 400-year-old painting by Peter Paul Rubens.
Here’s how the data broke…
Modern Evening Sale
- Total sales after fees: $303.1 million
- Lots sold (including guaranteed lots): 40
- Lots offered before withdrawals: 54
- Lots withdrawn Presale: 6
- Lots purchased: 8
- Sale rate including withdrawals: 83 percent
- Sale rate excluding withdrawals: 74.1%
- Total Hammer: $258.1 million
- Low pre-sale estimate before withdrawals: $290.6 million
- Hammer Total vs Presale Low Estimate: -32.5 million dollars
- Total low estimate of withdrawn batches: $18.5 million
- Total Low Estimate of Guaranteed Lots: $207.9 million (71.5% of total presales low estimate)
- Lots with house guarantees: 21
- Total low estimate of guaranteed third-party prizes: $172.4 million (59.3% of total presale low estimate)
- Lots with third-party guarantees: 17
- Top rated seller: Gustave Klimt, Insel im Attersee (c. 1901–2), hammered at $46.5 million (with fee: $53.2 million)
- Quote of the night: “Let’s have fun,” said Oliver Barker, the sale’s auctioneer, as two online bidders entered the fray for the sale’s final lot, an Edvard Munch landscape estimated at between 2 and 3 million. of dollars. He had been on the podium for three hours at the time and was eager to finish. “Wherever you are in the ether! We don’t need to be here anymore.
Afterwards : Phillips 20th Century and Evening Sale and Christie’s Gerald Fineberg Evening Sale, May 17. Check back throughout the week for our continuing coverage of this spring’s sales slate.
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