20th/21st Century: London evening sales achieve £196,685,600 / $250,380,769 / €229,335,410

On 7 March 2024, Christie’s 20th/21st Century: London Evening Sale and The Art of the Surreal Evening Sale delivered a market-leading performance, realising a combined total of £196,685,600 / $250,380,769 / €229,335,410. The sales, which were up 17 per cent from last year with a sell-through of 87 per cent by lot and 95 per cent by value, were led by René Magritte’s L’ami intime (The Intimate Friend) from the Gilbert and Lena Kaplan Collection, which achieved £33,660,000.

Christie’s unique 20/21 sale series attracted registered bidders from 31 countries, with 72 per cent from Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and 24 per cent from the Americas, confirming the wide appeal to global collectors of the presentation of 20th-century masterpieces alongside cutting-edge contemporary artists. Ten per cent of active buyers were millennials.

The 20th/21st Century: London Evening Sale achieved a total of £137,699,300 / $175,291,209 / €160,557,384, selling 86 per cent by lot and 94 per cent by value. The results reflected strong demand for selected masterpiece lots, many unseen on the market for decades.

A Bacon masterpiece

The auction was topped by Francis Bacon’s Landscape near Malabata, Tangier (1963), which achieved £19,630,000. Formerly in the collection of the late author Roald Dahl, and not seen at auction since 1985, it depicts the final resting place of the artist’s lover Peter Lacy, whom he met in 1952. The couple shared a long, passionate and volatile relationship before Lacy’s death in North Africa a decade later. The work was painted the following year, when Bacon also met his lover and muse George Dyer, who died tragically in 1971.

One of Bacon’s most widely exhibited paintings, it was most recently seen in 2022 as part of Francis Bacon: Man and Beast at London’s Royal Academy. It was also shown at the groundbreaking Francis Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective, which toured Tate Britain in London, the Prado in Madrid and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2008-09.

Hockney’s California, 1965

The £19.6m result for Bacon’s Landscape near Malabata, Tangier was closely followed by David Hockney’s California. Painted the year after the artist first visited America’s Golden State, the seminal, sun-drenched work forms part of his first ‘Swimming Pool’ series, made between 1964 and 1967, which also includes A Bigger Splash (1967).

California — unseen in public for more than 40 years, and the property of the current consignor since 1968 — was steered by auctioneer Adrien Meyer towards a final figure of £18,710,000.

Monet: 150 years of Impressionism

A third work from the Evening Sale achieved eight figures: Claude Monet’s Matinée sur la Seine, temps net (1897). Coinciding with the 150th anniversary of the first Impressionist exhibition, the sale of the work achieved £14,397,500, demonstrating the appetite for masterpieces above £10 million in Christie’s unique auction category — placing artists across periods in dialogue with one another. Offered at auction for the first time in 45 years, it belongs to the artist’s celebrated series ‘Mornings on the Seine’, a cycle of 21 canvases made across two summers, in which he captured the same view of the river at Giverny from his bateau-atelier (boat studio).

The Evening Sale included a second landscape by the Frenchman: Prairie fleurie à Giverny (1890), which realised £6,290,000. Spirited bidding was also witnessed for Impressionist paintings by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, whose Sur la falaise (1879) fetched £1,855,000, and Camille Pissarro, with Le Jardin de Maubuisson, Pontoise (1881) making £756,000.

British and European masters

There was also a strong result for Lucian Freud’s painting Kai (1991-92) — an intimate depiction of the adult son of Freud’s one-time lover, Suzy Boyt — which fetched £4,638,000. Freud’s smaller painting Plant Fragment (circa 1977), which was recently included in the exhibition Lucian Freud: Plant Portraits at London’s Garden Museum, flew past its low estimate of £300,000 after five minutes of bidding with auctioneer Yü-Ge Wang, to achieve £982,800. Raid on a Village (circa 1940), painted when Freud was just 17, made £403,200.

The School of London painter Michael Andrews, a friend of both Bacon and Freud, made a new auction record with School III: Butterfly Fish and Damsel Fish (1978), which achieved £3,125,500, eclipsing his previous record of £1,142,500 set at Christie’s in 2016.

London continues to be the leading marketplace for European masters: a strong offering of German Expressionists saw Alexej von Jawlensky’s 1912 Frau mit Fächer (Frau aus Turkestan) and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s double-sided canvas Zwei Mädchen mit Badewanne (Frau in flacher Wanne und Mädchen mit Fächer) (recto); Sitzender schwarzhaariger Mädchenakt (verso) make £4,759,000 and £3,791,000 respectively. Hermann Max Pechstein’s Abend in der Düne (1911) reached £2,460,000.

A quartet of works by the Italian Arte Povera artist Alighiero Boetti were offered mid-sale. Following a retrospective marking the 30th anniversary of his death at Christie’s in London last month, Mettere al mondo il mondo (circa 1974) achieved £1,310,500; Tutto (1988) made £630,000; (i) Rosso Gilera 60 1232 (ii) Beige Sabbia 583 (1967) made £907,200; and Cinque x cinque venticinque que (1988) made £693,000.

Late-20th-century sculpture was represented by Eduardo Chillida’s steel Down Town III (1990), which sold for £2,278,500 — more than double its low estimate — on the centenary of the artist’s birth. ZERO artist Günther Uecker’s assembly of nails, ash and a tree trunk from 1985, Untitled (Baum) (Tree), sold for more than triple its low estimate at £630,000, a record for a sculpture by the artist.

Strong demand for female artists

On the eve of International Women’s Day, the success of works by female artists signalled their continued appeal to global collectors.

Strong prices were achieved by Agnes Martin’s Loving Love (2000), a lyrical work from her late career, which realised £2,823,000, and by Cecily Brown’s early painting Can Can (1998), which made £2,218,000. Following the November 2023 sale of A Thistle Throb at Christie’s for $1,683,500 — more than triple its low estimate — Jadé Fadojutimi’s monumental 2021 canvas The Woven Warped Garden of Ponder set a new world auction record for the artist, achieving £1,552,500 after six minutes of bidding.

There were also notable results for Sonia Delaunay’s 1953 Rythme-Couleur (no. 132) — £1,129,000 — Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s Of All The Seasons from 2017 (£856,800) and Tracey Emin’s 2007 neon Love Poem for CF (£233,100), which was exhibited at the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007.

A group of contemporary women painters with new markets on the rise rounded off the sale. Claire Tabouret’s 2016 Les Debutantes (Pink and Black) fetched £239,400, Emma Webster’s Marshgate Snare (2022) made £100,800 and Allison Katz’s Snowglobe (2018) achieved £277,200 — a new world auction record for the Canadian artist.

The Art of the Surreal

Women artists were also well represented in the The Art of the Surreal Evening Sale, now in its 24th year.

Falling on the 100th anniversary of the publication of André Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto and the opening of Christie’s new base in Brussels headed by Astrid Centner, the sale of 25 Surrealist and Dada works by auctioneers Adrien Meyer and Veronica Scarpati realised a total of £58,986,300 / $75,089,560 / €68,778,026, with a sell-through rate of 88 per cent by lot and 98 per cent by value — up 52 per cent from last year.

Meret Oppenheim’s unique Surrealist bird-sculpture Tisch mit Vogelfüssen (1939) sold for £529,200, doubling both its high estimate and the artist’s previous auction record, while Hannah Höch’s important Dada photomontage Das schöne Mädchen (circa 1920) fetched £453,600, more than double its high estimate, establishing a new auction record for the artist in the medium.

The top lot of The Art of the Surreal — and the entire evening — was René Magritte’s iconic L’ami intime (1958), which sold for £33,660,000.

The work, from the collection of Gilbert and Lena Kaplan, was being offered at auction for the first time since 1980. Magritte’s bowler-hatted man appears in his paintings from the mid-1920s through to the artist’s death in 1967, and L’ami intime is one of the finest of the few examples to have remained in private hands.

The sale also saw strong results for Francis Picabia’s Veglione (circa 1924-25), which made £2,702,000, and Salvador Dalí’s The Birth of Liquid Anguish (Naissance des angoisses liquides), which achieved £1,976,000.

Christie’s 20th and 21st Century Art London season continued on 8 March with the Impressionist and Modern Art Day and Works on Paper Sale, which achieved a total of £16,878,456 / $21,587,545 / €19,714,037, with strong sell-through rates of 92% by value and 88% by lot.

Following the strength of results for German Expressionists in the evening sale, Kirchner’s 1933-35 work Sonnentänzerin led the auction with £781,200, while modern masters such as Marc Chagall — whose Fleurs et fruits (1949) achieved £730,800 — exceeded pre-sale expectations. On International Women’s Day, and following a record set for the artist in The Art of the Surreal, Höch’s 1919 Bürgerliches Brautpaar (Streit) sold for £264,600 from a pre-sale estimate of £50,000-80,000. Suzanne Valadon’s Femme nue assise (1921) sold for £239,400 against an estimate of £60,000-80,000.

The Post-War and Contemporary Art Day Sale on 9 March totalled £14,541,660 / $18,598,783 / €16,984,659, led by Keith Haring’s Untitled (1984), which sold for £945,000.

The appeal of female artists was demonstrated with strong results across the sale, which sold 91% by value and 85% by lot. British artists Louise Giovanelli and Annie Morris achieved auction records with £85,680 for Ether (2020) and £327,600 for Stack 9, Copper Blue (2018), while Everlyn Nicodemus’s 1983 canvas Kvinnan (Woman) set a new world auction record for the artist (£44,100) and Emma McIntyre’s If there is light that has weight (2021) sold for £100,800 against an estimate of £15,000-20,000.

Above-estimate prices were also achieved for Etel Adnan’s Untitled, 2014 (£157,500), Ewa Juszkiewicz’s 2015 oil Untitled (after Elisabeth-Louise Vigée-Le Brun), 2014 (£378,000), Yayoi Kusama’s 2003 Butterflies (£516,600) and Elizabeth Peyton’s 1996 watercolour Marcello (£176,400). Closing on 12 March, First Open: Post-War and Contemporary Art Online achieved ££1,233,918 / $1,578,181 / €1,441,216, bringing the March 2024 season total to £229,339,634 / $292,145,278 / €267,475,321.

Continuing Christie’s 20th and 21st Century Art sales series, the Modern British and Irish Art Evening Sale takes place on 20 March 2024, followed by the Modern British and Irish Art Day Sale on 21 March. The pre-sale view runs until 20 March