(New York) A painting by the French giant of impressionism Claude Monet was sold Wednesday evening at auction in New York for nearly 35 million US dollars, announced Sotheby’s.
After a decline in the global art market in 2023, the major auction houses Christie’s and Sotheby’s launched their spring sales on Monday in the American capital of arts and finance, in a rather optimistic climate after good results at London and Paris.
Sotheby’s, which belongs to Franco-Israeli billionaire Patrick Drahi, reported Wednesday evening the sale online, by telephone and at its Manhattan headquarters of around fifty modern art paintings for US$235 million.
One of the most expensive canvases, Grindstones in Giverny (1893) by Claude Monet, sold “in an eight-minute bidding war” for US$34.8 million, a spokeswoman said.
And a work by the British-Mexican Leonora Carrington (1917-2011) broke an auction record for the artist with “Les Distractions de Dagobert” sold for 28.5 million US dollars to a buyer “in the room after a battle of ten minutes “.
This “places Carrington among the five highest-rated female artists, ahead of male surrealists, Max Ernst and Salvador Dali,” Sotheby’s argued.
Its competitor Christie’s, owned by the Artémis holding of French billionaire François Pinault, has suffered a cyberattack since last Thursday which disrupted its website where part of the auctions take place. But the company assured that it had “managed” this “technological security problem”.
During its evening on Tuesday at its prestigious Rockefeller Center headquarters in the heart of Manhattan, Christie’s sold $115 million worth of contemporary art, including part of the collection of a famous American-Cuban art dealer. of Miami who died in February, Rosa de la Cruz.
A painting by the American Jean-Michel Basquiat The Italian Version of Popeye has no Pork in his Diet also sold for 32 million dollars, far from the records of the legendary New York artist who died at the age of 27 in 1988.
Moreover, Basquiat also dominated the two evenings Tuesday and Wednesday at the small Phillips auction house with Untitled (ELMAR) sold for 46.5 million US.
Against the backdrop of wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, with fewer Russian buyers on the market, global art auction sales reached US$14.9 billion in 2023 compared to US$16 billion in 2022 ( -14.5%), the year after the pandemic which had shattered all ceilings.