FREUD SELLS FOR £7.86 MILLION ($15.6 MILLION / €11.6 MILLION) AT CHRISTIE’S £74 MILLION RECORD SALE Christie’s auction realises £74.1 million ($147.3 million / € 109.6million), the highest ever total for the category in Europe.
Lucian Freud’s portrait of Bruce Bernard realises $15.6 million
Magazine. Bruce wrote a number of books on photography and painting and was the author of one of the most important monographs on Freud’s work; he was also the brother of the legendary columnist and Soho bon vivant Jeffrey Bernard.
- Three Marilyns, 1962, by Andy Warhol (1928-1987) realized £5,620,000 ($11,172,560 / €8,311,980). One of the first multiple images that Warhol made of the deceased star Marilyn Monroe, this work is particularly rare in its vertical form: of these Marilyns from 1962, only one other is recorded with a single strip of vertical images, and in that case there are only two, in black and white. Here, though, with the triple repetition, Warhol manages to give this silk-screened image of Marilyn Monroe a filmic appearance, as though it were itself related to the strips of celluloid of her cinema career.
- Two Men Working in a Field, 1971, by Francis Bacon (1909-1992) realized £5,060,000 ($10,059,280 / €7,483,740) while Landscape with a car, 1939-1946, also by Francis Bacon (1909-1992) sold for £4,276,000 ($8,500,688 / €6,324,204). This is one of the very few paintings made by the artist during the Second World War to have survived both the ravages of the period and the destructive violence of the artist’s ferocious self-criticism. A mere twenty six paintings from this era remain today, of which Landscape with a car is one of the scarce and important survivors which can also be positively ascribed to the first twenty years of Francis Bacon's career.
- Still Life with Stretcher, Mirror, Bowl of Fruit, 1972, by Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1997) sold for £4,052,000 ($8,055,376 / €5,992,908).
- A selection of eighteen works from the CAP Collection sold for a total of £6,602,000 ($13,124,776 / €9,764,358). Assembled since 1996 by Anthony Pilaro, founder of Duty Free and BriteSmile and CAP Foundation Chairman, the majority of sale proceeds will benefit the Ron Brown Scholar Program, which annually awards scholarships to academically talented, highly motivated African-American high school seniors. The top lot of the Collection was Grosse Geister No. 9 and No. 14 by Thomas Schütte (b.1954) which sold for £1,400,000 ($2,266,320 / €1,686,060), a world record price for the artist at auction.
Record prices at auction were established for 15 artists at this evening’s auction: Kara Walker (lot 1), Thomas Schütte (lot 6), Rosemarie Trockel (lot 11), Christopher Wool (lot 15), Piero Manzoni (lot 23), Paulo Rego (lot 27), Michael Andrews (lot 33), Lucian Freud (lot 35), John Wonnacott (lot 37), R. B. Kitaj (lot 41), Christopher Bramham (lot 43), Craigie Aitchison (lot 44), Antoni Tàpies (lot 71) and Pei-Ming (lot 89).
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Images available on request
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- The previous record for a work by Lucian Freud was Red Haired Man on a Chair, 1962–1963, which sold for £4,152,000 ($7,703,153) at Christie’s London on 9 February 2005.
- Christie’s is the world's leading art business with global auction sales in 2006 that totaled £2.51 billion / $4.67 billion. This 36% increase
