AUCTION history was duly made at Sotheby’s New York on the evening of Wednesday, May 5 when Picasso’s iconic 1905 Rose Period canvas, Garçon à la Pipe, was knocked down for a hammer price of $93m (£54.7m), making it the most expensive work of art ever sold at auction.
This bettered, by some distance, the previous high of $75m
(£45.7m) paid for Van Gogh's Portrait of Dr. Gachet at Christie's,
New York, in May 1990.
The choicest plum among 34 works being sold from the collection of
Mr and Mrs John Hay Whitney to benefit the charitable works of the
Greentree Foundation, Garçon à la Pipe was one of the last
undisputed Impressionist and Modern masterpieces to emerge from one
of the 20th century's greatest major-name collections. The Whitneys
had acquired the painting from the Zurich dealer Walter
Feilchenfeldt in 1950 for around $30,000.
A quarter of a century on, the painting had been valued by
Sotheby's "in excess of $70m". There was plenty of pre-sale
speculation that this Picasso might be the first work to break the
$100m hammer price barrier, but on the night, after an initial
flurry of competition between four telephones, only the New York
dealer Larry Gagosian on a mobile phone and a bidder represented in
the room by Sotheby's chairman Warren Weitman were prepared to
climb into the financial thin air of $80m-plus. Weitman, who was
bidding without a telephone, eventually prevailed at $93m ($104m
including premium). Sotheby's, predictably, were keen to keep both
the identity and nationality of the buyer deeply anonymous.
The Whitney lots netted a premium-inclusive total of $190m
(£112m). The following day's Part I and II Impressionist and Modern
sales at Sotheby's netted a further $124m (£73m), creating a
combined total of $314m (£185m), which represented the firm's most
successful Imp & Mod series since May 1990. Christie's
equivalent sales on May 4 and 6 totalled a rather less imposing
$75.5m (£44.5m).
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