Selections from the Allan Stone Collection Realizes $52.5 Million at Christie's New York Selections from the Allan Stone Collection, a group of Post-War and Contemporary Art; tribal and folk art; and Art Deco works of art, realized $52,423,400.
News-Antique.com - Nov 13,2007 - New York – This evening, a packed and busy room saw Selections from the Allan Stone Collection, a group of Post-War and Contemporary Art; tribal and folk art; and Art Deco works of art, realizing $52,423,400, selling 94% by value and setting 12 new world auction records. Following last week’s highly successful sales which totaled $472 million and witnessed the second highest fine art auction result ever at $395 million for the Impressionist and Modern Art Evening Sale, the sale of the Stone Collection showed the strength of the art market and the commitment of connoisseurship and capital from around the world. Vibrant and energetic, the sale was a bold prelude to tomorrow’s Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Sale. New records were set for artists including Wayne Thiebaud and John Chamberlain, Antoni Gaudí and Carlo Bugatti and for an American folk art piece attributed to Thomas V. Brooks.
“This evening, we enjoyed fantastic participation from around the world, including our first evening sale lot sold through Christie’s LIVE™,” said Christopher Burge, Honorary Chairman and the evening’s auctioneer. “It was Christie’s honor to celebrate Allan Stone’s passion and visionary connoisseurship with such a successful sale.”
The Allan Stone Gallery gave Wayne Thiebaud his first one-man show in 1962. The success of that show led to the artist’s first single-artist museum exhibition, just a few months later, at the M. H. de Young Museum in San Francisco. Thiebaud highlights in the sale were the record-setting Seven Suckers, 1970 ($4,521,000); Tie Rack, 1969 ($3,401,000) and Blue Hill, 1967 ($1,721,000).
One of the important changes in Willem de Kooning's art occurred in 1963, when the artist left New York for a studio on the light-filled eastern end of Long Island. From this period, Man combines two of the strains of his art until that time: the bravura landscapes of the late 1950s and the celebrated Women of a decade before. The painting fetched $4,521,000 this evening at Christie’s. Other works by de Kooning included Untitled, 1942 ($5,305,000) and Study for Marshes, 1945-46 ($4,297,000).
Chamberlain took the known visible world and transformed it into something new and unique, and did so with glistening chrome and a full spectrum of brilliant coloration. The sale offered several quintessential works by Chamberlain, including Hatband, 1960, which realized $2,841,000 and set a new world auction record for the artist.
Other highlights in this evening’s sale included Franz Kline’s Untitled, 1951 ($2,729,000); Alfred Leslie’s Nix on Nixon ($385,000); and John Graham’s Woman with Dodecahedron, 1959 ($1,609,000).
In the 20th Century Decorative Art and Design category, the sale offered a two-part folding screen by Antoni Gaudí, created for Casa Milà, one of Barcelona’s most striking modernismo buildings. The screen realized $1,385,000, setting a new world auction record for the Catalan master. Carlo Bugatti, the pre-eminent Italian designer from the early years of the twentieth century, was present with a metal-inlaid stained wood and painted parchment double-sided partner’s desk, circa 1900, which realized $1,553,000, twelve times greater than the previous record for
