SOTHEBY’S $315.9 MILLION SALE HIGHLIGHTS MARKET’S CONTINUING STRENGTH

The art world continued its shopping spree last night at Sotheby’s, where contemporary art collectors and dealers dropped a cool $315.9 million—a record auction total for Sotheby’s, reports Carol Vogel in the New York Times. Of the seventy-one lots offered at Sotheby’s, only six failed to sell. “On Tuesday night, people didn’t know what to expect,” Philippe Ségalot, a Manhattan dealer who bought several works for three different clients, said at Sotheby’s. “But tonight the mood was far better.” Second Version of Study for Bullfight No. 1, 1969, on a theme that Francis Bacon was obsessed with, was the evening’s most expensive painting, selling for $45.9 million. Hanging Heart (Magenta/Gold), 1994–2006, a monumental bright-red sculpture by Jeff Koons that adorned the cover of Sotheby’s auction catalog, went for $23.5 million. A gray and black canvas by Mark Rothko sold for $10.7 million, against its estimate of $12 million to $18 million. (The price with premium was $12 million.) The sellers were the Iowa collectors John and Mary Pappajohn, who had bought the canvas at Christie’s for $800,000 in 1996.