De Kooning sets record but still falls flat at muted Sotheby’s Contemporary Evening Sale
Works by Yayoi Kusama and Gerhard Richter were also among those that failed to hit their presale estimates
“Don’t panic, it’s okay,” auctioneer Tom Eddison told the sale room as an alarm briefly interrupted the start of Sotheby’s London’s Contemporary Evening Sale on Thursday. The disruption was quickly dealt with, but the art market warning delivered by the auction results may prove harder to brush aside.
The sale, held at Sotheby’s New Bond Street premises on Thursday (15 October), brought in £36.9m at hammer, below its £41.7m low estimate. Including fees, the total reached £45.9m, slightly below last October’s £47.6m.
The top lot of the evening was Willem de Kooning’s 1977 oil on canvas Untitled . Eddison opened the bid for the guaranteed work at £7m, below the presale low estimate of £8m. (Sale price includes fees, presale estimates do not.) The work hammered at £8.2m and sold for £9.8m after fees, setting a record for the artist at auction in Europe. The amount paid is two and a half times what the work sold for at Sotheby’s New York in 2015.
Of the 34 lots offered after three were withdrawn, six went unsold. The sell-through rate was 82%, with approximately 30% of the lots hammering above their respective presale low estimate.
The results reflect the overall cautious mood of the market for contemporary art, which has also been observed at Frieze London, said Thomas Stauffer, the co-founder of the Zurich-based Gerber & Stauffer Fine Arts and president of the Swiss Art Market Association. Stauffer is in town for the art week.
“Collectors are not willing to take big risks,” Stauffer said, noting that many are on the fence and put their limits “conservatively low”, unwilling to go above high estimates in most cases.
The fact that works by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye (presale estimates £600,000 to £900,000) and Jadé Fadojutimi (£350,000 to £450,000), whose prices were off the charts a couple of years ago, went unsold is “concerning” for the ultra-contemporary segment, the dealer and advisor said. “The price hikes have been proven to be unhealthy, and people are no longer willing to pay fantasy prices for young artists.”
A 2021 walled sculpture, I Who Was Awestruck at the Shape of the Secret I Found in the Cosmos , by Yayoi Kusama, who died recently, was hammered at £250,000, a quarter of the presale low estimate of £1m. It sold for £320,000 after fees. “It’s more than a little scratch; that result does not go down well in auction database history,” Stauffer commented. He questioned the presale valuation and called the consignor's consent to sell substantially below that figure as “mysterious”.
It was not all bad news. The second most valuable lot of the night was Gerhard Richter’s 1992 Abstraktes Bild , which debuted at Documenta and was shown last year at the artist’s major retrospective at Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris. The work sold for £5.4m (£6.7m with fees), slightly below the presale low estimate of £6m. But this is well above its previous sale price of £3.6m achieved in a 2011 Christie’s London sale.
Trailing behind in third place was Mark Rothko’s Untitled guaranteed Colour Field painting executed in 1969. The painting sold for £3m (£3.8m) to an online bidder, meeting the presale low estimate. The work, which has been in the same collection for more than three decades, last sold for $264,000 (approximately £148,104 based on the historical exchange rate) at a 1992 Christie’s sale. A 1964 Rothko painting, which had a $9.9m to $16m (£7.5m to £12.3m) estimate, was withdrawn from Sotheby’s Hong Kong evening sale last month.
David Hockney's iPad drawing 10th, 22nd June 2021, Water Lilies in the Pond with Pots of Flowers attracted active bidding. The drawing made a hammer price of £1.5 million (£1.9m with fees), three times its £450,000 presale low estimate and setting an auction record for any iPad work by the artist.
Another Hockney work, an acrylic and paper collage titled Henry Reading (1985), sold for £2.3m (£2.8m after fees), above the presale low estimate of £2.2m. It was a guaranteed work and fresh to the auction market.
Michael Andrews’ small acrylic on paper painting Butterfly Fish (1978) also sparked interest among bidders, who drove the bids to nearly five times above the presale high estimate of £120,000, reaching a hammer price of £550,000. The fresh-to-auction work sold for £704,000 after fees, setting an artist record for a work on paper.
Other notable results included George Baselitz’s figurative painting P.D. Idol (1964). Bidding for the guaranteed work was intense and it sold for £1.9m (£2.4m after fees), nearly double the presale low estimate of £1m. The result was slightly above its previous sale price of £1.8m achieved at Phillips London in 2018.
The house noted that Thursday’s sale result has brought the total auction sales across all categories at Sotheby’s London in 2026 to $1bn, with £598m ($793m) generated from Modern and contemporary auctions, the highest year-to-date total since 2015.
