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The Impressionist and Modern Art Evening Sale and the auction of Art of the Surreal held on February 7, 2012 at Christie's in Londonn realised £134,999,400 / $213,299,052 / €162,269,279 selling 86% by lot  and 93% by  value.  The  sales  had  a  combined  pre-sale  estimate  of  £86.2  million  to  £127.1 million. 

At this evening's auction, 3 lots sold for over £10 million, 6 for over £5 million and 28 for over £1 million. The sale attracted bidding from around the world and buyers originated from more than 21 countries in 4 continents.

The top price was paid for Reclining Figure: Festival, 1951, by Henry Moore(1898-1986) which realized £19,081,250 / $30,148,375 / €22,935,663– a world record price for the artist at auction.

“These strong results illustrate that the art market continues to attract significant levels of spending, particularly for  the rarest and most exceptional works of art. It is an extremely intelligent market where pricing is key – and where collectors react with the greatest determination to the rarest works of art, and particularly to those which are fresh to the  market.  We  are  particularly  pleased  to  have  established  record  prices  for  two  great  artists  of  the  20th  century: Henry  Moore  and  Joan  Miró.  In  both  cases,  we  offered  works  of  art  that  were  among  the  greatest  produced  by  the artists, and their quality drew the most determined of bidding. It has been a great honour to have presented fine art from The Collection of Elizabeth Taylor, and to have seen three works sold this evening for twice our expectations”, said Giovanna  Bertazzoni,  International  Head of Impressionist and Modern Art, Christie's.

Leading highlights of the sale:

The  top  price  was  paid  for  Reclining  Figure:  Festival,  1951,  by  Henry  Moore  (1898-1986) which realised £19,081,250 / $30,148,375 / €22,935,663– a world record price for the artist at auction. In 1949, the year after Moore was awarded the international prize for sculpture at the Venice Biennale, he was commissioned by the Arts Council to create a sculpture for the 1951  Festival  of  Britain; the sculpture sold at this evening's auction is this  work.  Its importance lies not only in the significance of the commission itself but also it functions as a key to this period of Moore's work. It was acquired by an anonymous telephone bidder after a 5 minute bidding battle. 

Painting-Poem (“le corps de ma brune puisque je l'aime comme ma chatte habillée en vert salade comme de la grêle c'est pareil”),  1925,  by Joan  Miró  (1893-1983)  sold  for  £16,841,250  /  $26,609,175  / €20,243,183 –  a world  record  price  for  the  artist  at  auction  (estimate:  £6-9  million).  Part abstract void, part lyrical free-form painting and part hand-written stream-of-consciousness poetry, Le corps de ma brune… is one of the finest and best-known of an extraordinary group of  paintings produced  by  the  artist  in  1925,  in  which  he  successfully  pushed  beyond  the conventional  boundaries  of  painting  and  the  picture-plane  to  create  a  radical  new  mental space; fusing word image and painterly form into a new free-form of expression conveying an hallucinatory or dream-like state of consciousness.

“Le  livre”,  1914-1915,  by  Juan  Gris  (1887-1927)  sold  for  £10,345,250  /  $16,345,495  / €12,434,991. Executed in Paris between the end of 1914 and the start of 1915, the painting marks the artist's change of stylistic approach to working from  an  abstract  compositional armature towards its subject matter. First shown at the major post-war Cubisme exhibition at the  Galerie  de  France,  Paris,  in  1945  and  subsequently  shown  throughout  Europe  and America  in  the  1940s,  50s  and  60s,  it  was  then  unseen  for  30  years  until  the  2005 retrospective in Madrid.

"La Corne d'Or, Constantinople", 1907, by Paul Signac (1863-1935) sold for £8,777,250 ,$13,868,055 ,€10,550,255 while Henry Moore's Working Model for Three piece N°3 Vertebrae fetched £5,081,250 ,$8,028,375 ,€6,107,663.

A painting titled “La Tour Eiffel”, 1926 by Robert Delaunay (1885-1941) was sold at a world record price of  £3,737,250, $5,904,855 ,€4,492,175 against a high estimate of 2 millions while “Le Nu et le mannequin", 1947 by Belgian artist Paul Delvaux realised £3,401,250 ,$5,373,975 ,€4,088,303. Meanwhile “Thema: Spitz”, 1927 by Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) sold for £2,953,250 ,$4,666,135 ,€3,549,807

Three  works  of  art  from  the  storied  Collection  of  Elizabeth  Taylor  fetched  a  combined £13,787,750 ($21,784,645 /€16,572,876), more than doubling their pre-sale low estimate of £6.2 million

Vue de l'asile et de la Chapelle de Saint-Rémy, by Vincent van Gogh fetched the top price of the group at £10,121,250 ($15,991,575 /€12,165,743. The luminous landscape, painted in the turquoise and ochre hues of early autumn, is a view of the asylum where the artist spent his  last  months.  Elizabeth Taylor's father, the art dealer Francis Taylor, had purchased the painting on her behalf at auction in 1963 for £92,000. Up until her death in March of 2011, the painting had hung in the living room of Miss Taylor's home in Bel Air, CA. Earlier in the sale, a youthful self-portrait by Edgar Degas (1834-1917) sold for £713,250 ($1,126,935 / € 857,327) and a large-scale landscape by Claude Pissarro (1830-1903) entitled Pommiers à Éragny realized £2,953,250 ($4,666,135 /€ 3,549,807.

In December 2011, Christie's New York sold Miss Taylor's exquisite collections of jewelry, fashion, decorative arts and memorabilia in a four-day marathon auction series that totalled $156.8 million and set multiple new auction records.

Christie's was honoured to have been entrusted by the Hubertus Wald Charitable Foundation with the sale of their founder's collection. Hubertus Wald, a philanthropic collector from Hamburg,  Germany,  put  together  one  of  the  great  collections  of  20th  century  art  in continental  Europe.  At  this evening's auction, 17 works realised a combined total of £11,723,650 / $18,523,367 / €14,091,827 against a pre-sale estimate of £6.9 million to £10.5 million.

Art of the Surreal

Since 2001, Christie's have dedicated a section of the February evening sale in London to surrealist art. This evening's auction of Art of the Surreal realised £37,185,250 / $58,752,695 / €44,696,671 – the  highest  ever  total  for  the  category  (included  in  the  sale  totals  above).  The  top  price  was  paid  for Painting-Poem (“le corps de ma brune puisque je l'aime comme ma chatte habillée en vert salade comme de la grêle c'est pareil”),  1925,  by  Joan  Miró  (1893-1983)  which  sold  for  £16,841,250  /  $26,609,175  / €20,243,183 – a world record price for the artist at auction (see above).