LONDON AUCTIONS REACHED $762.9 MILLION
London auctioneers sold £391.7 million ($762.9 million) of art from the holdings of Charles Saatchi and other collectors last week, up 51 percent from last winter, reports Bloomberg‘s Linda Sandler. The Richard Gray Gallery paid a record £14 million ($27.3 million) for a Francis Bacon painting at Christie’s International. Sotheby’s said Peter Doig became Europe’s priciest living artist when a picture sold for £5.7 million ($11.1 million). An Egon Schiele work from Ronald Lauder’s Neue Galerie failed to find a buyer at Christie’s. While buyers of contemporary art weren’t deterred by a ten-year quadrupling of prices, the crowds thinned before the end of the long Impressionist and modern sales—three hours and 126 lots at Christie’s. Sotheby’s and Christie’s beat their top estimates for contemporary art and missed them in their Impressionist sales.
