Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale

Top lot of the sale: Claude Monet (1840-1926), Le bassin aux nymphéas, oil on canvas, painted in 1919, which sold for $27,045,000/ £18,755,201/ €23,669,064.

The May 12 evening sale of Impressionist & Modern Art realized US$141,532,000 / £98,149,792 / €123,865,037 with sell-through rates of 86% by lot and 89% by value. Frida Kahlo’s Dos desnudos en el bosque (La tierra misma), which achieved $8,005,000, established a new world auction record for the artist and for any Latin American artist at auction. The results of tonight’s sale brings the week’s running total to $620.7 million.

The sale attracted registered bidders from 36 countries, with strong bidding from Asia, Europe and the United States.

Brooke Lampley, Head of Impressionist & Modern Art at Christie’s New York, remarked: “The strong outcome of tonight’s sale is the result of confidence and enthusiasm in the market at the tail end of a successful week. This was a tightly edited sale that united rare and blue-chip works at a variety of price levels. Bidders competed vigorously for works by Barbara Hepworth, Francis Picabia, Paul Klee, Hermann Max Pechstein, and Marc Chagall. We saw Asian bidding for a wide range of artists at a variety of price points. It was gratifying to witness a sophisticated and intelligent market at work. We are particularly proud of the result achieved for Frida Kahlo’s Dos desnudos en el bosque, which set the world auction record for the artist and became the highest price for any work by a Latin American artist. Tonight’s results bring our running total to $620.7 million and we now look forward to tomorrow’s Impressionist and Modern Works on Paper and Day Sale.”

For more special features, videos and information on the Impressionist & Modern Art sales, visit 20th Century at Christie’s.