SUCCESS FOR SOTHEBY’S LENZ SALE
On Wednesday evening, Sotheby’s made history for the second week running, this time with contemporary art, writes Souren Melikian for the New York Times.
In a two-hour session conducted by Tobias Meyer, the auction house’s worldwide head of contemporary art, seventy-four of the seventy-seven lots offered sold for £54.07 million, or about $84.5 million. While greater totals have been recorded in the past, a contemporary art sale with a 96 percent success rate is an unheard-of occurrence.
Sotheby’s luck was to have secured large holdings from the collection built up over the past fifty years by Gerhard and Anna Lenz. The German couple was involved with the Zero avant-garde art movement almost from its beginnings. This gave the cachet of history to forty-nine paintings, drawings, and low-relief panels made up from a variety of media.
From the moment “go,” bidders jumped in with a determination never witnessed before in a contemporary art sale. The session opened with rows of aluminum strips hung on a panel signed by Heinz Mack in 1961. Mack was a friend of the French painter Yves Klein, whose influence on the emergence of Zero was decisive. Estimated to be worth £25,000 ($39,000) to £35,000 ($55,000) plus the 25 percent sale charge, the Untitled (Lamellen Relief) panel ended up at £205,250 ($322,000).
Next came a very different work, Rauchbild (Smoke Picture), painted by Otto Piene, also in 1961. That went up to £223,250 ($350,000). However, when the third lot signed by Günther Uecker in 1964 rose to £825,250 ($1.3 million), establishing a third auction record in a row, it became clear that the entire movement was causing wild excitement, regardless of style and medium. Of the forty-nine works from the Lenz collection all but one sold, mostly multiplying their high estimates many times over. The sale ended with nineteen world auction records.
