The picture from 1891 drew 14-minute bidding battle before it was knocked down at $72.5m (£58m) to an anonymous buyer on the telephone who saw off four competitors.
The price surpassed the previous record for the French Impressionist posted in 2008 when Christie’s London sold one of his Nympheas (waterlilies) paintings from 1919 at £36.5m.
While eight examples of the later and more numerous waterlilies series have appeared at auction over the last five years, the opportunity to acquire one of Monet’s 25 Meule (Grainstack) pictures from 1890-1891 was much rarer occurrence on the open market.
Estimated ‘in the region of $45m’, the 2ft 5in x 3ft (73 x 92cm) oil on canvas came to Christie’s from a US vendor. It was one of only a handful of Meule paintings to remain in private hands with most others now in museums including the Musée d'Orsay in Pairs, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the National Gallery of Scotland.
The Meule series shows Monet experimenting with repeated depictions of a single landscape under different lighting and weather conditions, although the example here was billed as “among the most formally adventurous of all the Grainstacks – part of a trio of canvases in which a single conical meule is seen close up and cropped by the painting’s edge”.
The sum fetched by the picture helped lift Christie’s 48-lot Impressionist & Modern art evening sale to a hammer total of $214.4m (£171.5m) against a presale estimate of $200.8m-270.3m. Overall, 39 lots sold on the night (81%).
‘Rigid et courbé’ by Wassily Kandinsky that set an auction record for the artist when it sold for $20.6m (£16.5m) at Christie’s New York.
Also making a record sum was Wassily Kandinsky’s Rigid et courbé (Rigid and curved), a painting executed in Paris by the Russian abstract artist in 1935. Estimated at $18m-25m, it sold at $20.6m (£16.5m).
The sale also offered a selection of works by Pablo Picasso which was led by the 1938 oil on canvas Buste de femme (Dora Maar). Selling at $20m (£16m) against an $18m-25m estimate, it was bought by Japanese collector Yusaku Maezawa, who released a comment through Christie’s after the sale: “I am honoured to be able to live with and enjoy this work by Pablo Picasso, the most beloved artist of all artists.”
£1 = $1.25
