Guinness Art: despite the art market crisis, ‘blue chip’ auctions continue to produce record returns. The all-time record remains Mundi Savior attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, sold by Christie’s to Saudi royals in 2017 for 450.3 million dollars, a still unclimbed stratospheric peak that was climbed this week at Sotheby’s with Gustav Klimt’s portrait of Elisabeth Lederer from the collection of beauty magnate Leonard Lauder: it sold for 236 million dollars, a record for a modern artist.
Then yesterday Frida Kalho mysteriously broke through another barrier That dream (La cama) changed hands for 54.7 million dollars, a record so far for a woman’s work. 20th century art continues to attract great interest: before Klimt at Sotheby’s, in 2022 a blue Marylin at Christies sold for 195 million dollars, surpassing the 179.4 million Femmes d’Algiers (version 0) of Pablo Picasso’s work which in 2015 stopped at 179 million dollars.
Klimt, Warhol, Picasso, but also Amedeo Modigliani, (Nu couché, 170 million at Christie’s in 2015), Alberto Giacometti (L’Homme au Doigt, 141 million in 2015), Paul Cezanne (La Montagne Sainte-Victoire by Paul Cezanne 138 million in 2022), Magritte (L’Empire des Lumieres, 121 million last year) and Vincent Van Gogh (Forest with Cypress Trees, 117 million) are part of the increasingly crowded club of ‘over a hundred million dollars’ where in 2017 Haitian-American Jean Michel Basquiat also entered – at the top of the list among black artists – with his iconic skull from 1982 selling for 138 million dollars.
And if yesterday Kahlo became the most expensive female artist, beating sales of Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1. 1 which was paid 44 million in 2014 for 44 million, then the record for a female statue remains the monumental Spider by Louise Bourgeois which changed hands at Sotheby’s in 2023 for almost 33 million dollars.
Market interest in the Grand Master is more lukewarm: the peak of the Salvator Mundi remains unclimbed even if in 2021 a Tondo by Sandro Botticelli achieved 92 million dollars at Sotheby’s, the second highest price in history for an Old Master. As for the collection as a whole, the record is held by technology tycoon Paul Allen, 1.6 billion dollars and 100% sold by Christie’s two years ago, followed by the dispersal of the collection of former couple Harry and Linda Macklowe six months earlier by Sotheby’s: 922 million.
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