Europe is seeing a historic heat wave, but things were a bit more lukewarm in Christie’s London salesroom on Thursday evening at a two-part sale featuring 56 contemporary artworks from the collection of Anita and Poju Zabludowicz followed by a 79-lot sale of postwar and contemporary art. A £4 million ($5.2 million) Philip Guston from the Zabludowicz’s holdings led the sale. The evening totaled £25.7 million ($34 million), with the first sale making £15.5 million ($20.5 million) and the second £10.2 million ($13.5 million).
The Zabludowicz works were estimated to total between £12.6 million and £19.3 million ($16.6 million–$25.5 million); the hammer total was £12.3 million ($16.2 million), just below the low estimate; with the house’s fees, the sale totaled £15.4 million ($20.5 million). Seven lots were guaranteed; three were withdrawn; seven failed to find buyers, for a sell-through rate of 89 percent. Records were set for Anj Smith, Rose Wylie, and Jakub Julian Ziolkowski.
Guston’s Mirror Head (1977) led the Zabludowicz works, fetching just shy of £4 million ($5.2 million) on a £3.5 million ($4.6 million) low estimate, thus accounting for a third of the sale’s value. No other works reached nearly those heights, with the second-highest price coming in within estimate at £1.3 million ($1.7 million) for an 11-foot-wide Mark Bradford mixed-media collage, Farther South and Elsewhere (2015). Rashid Johnson’s 10-foot-wide Untitled Broken Crowd (2021) sold within estimate for £952,500 ($1.3 million), while a 1994 Richard Prince’s Untitled (Cowboy) exceeded estimate to fetch £1.6 million ($2.1 million). No other works owned by Zabludowiczes, who have appeared on ARTnews’s Top 200 Collectors list each year since 2005, cleared £1 million.
Philip Guston, Mirror Head (1977).
Since the collector couple remain together and are both still living, as Katya Kazakina pointed out in Artnet News, the classic “three Ds” (death, debt, and divorce) that often account for high-profile auctions like this one don’t seem to apply, leading to questions about why, in a softened market, they would choose to sell. Sources told Kazakina the reason was “years of strain between the Zabludowiczes and parts of the art world over the family’s ties to Israel.” The couple had been collecting since 1994 and held some 8,000 works by about 600 artists, Artnet notes.
The other contemporary sale was estimated to fetch between £8.6 million and £12.1 million ($11.4 million–$16 million), but fell short, achieving a hammer total of just £8.1 million ($10.7 million), or £10.2 million ($13.5 million) after the house’s fees. Christie’s found buyers for 81 percent of lots offered, and an auction record was set for Vanessa Raw at £25,400 ($33,519).
Leading the sale was Cecily Brown’s nearly nine-foot-wide painting The Haunter (2010), which was guaranteed to sell and took just over a minute to squeak past its £2.2 million ($2.91 million) low estimate to hammer for £2.25 million ($2.97 million).
Cecily Brown’s The Haunter (2010) sold for £2.25 million ($2.97 million).
The next priciest lot from this part of the sale was an Andy Warhol’s Jackie (1964), which took just about a minute to hammer for £420,000 ($555,000), just above its low estimate, or £533,400 ($704,000) with fees. Other top prices were accounted for by Günther Uecker, Antony Gormley, Julian Schnabel, and Damien Hirst.
Just days after the artist’s death, an editioned David Hockney iPad drawing printed on paper, The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire in 2011 (twenty eleven) – 30 April (2011), hammered at £220,000 ($291,000) against a £150,000 ($198,000) high estimate, or £279,400 ($368,861) with fees.
Auctioneer Lisanne de Jooden couldn’t resist a quip when it came to the night’s final lot, Jeff Koons’s sexually explicit 1991 photograph Dirty – Jeff On Top (price: £139,700, or $184,000), saying, as she brought down the hammer, “Going out with a bang!”
