MAY 13, 2008-CHRISTIE'S CONTEMPORARY DOES $348 MILLION-the second-highest total ever.
Lucian Freud’s large-scale Benefits Supervisor Sleeping, 1995, brought $33.6 million with buyer’s premium, the highest price ever paid for a work by a living artist. Lucian, the grandson of Sigmund, is eighty-five years old.
MAY 14, 2008 -SOTHEBY’S CONTEMPORARY DOES $362 MILLION
The auction, which totaled $362 million, was the biggest in the company’s history. Tobias Meyer, Sotheby’s chief auctioneer, said the sale was the result of “global hunger” on the part of “global individuals” who “live everywhere.” Enlightening!
A 1976 triptych by Francis Bacon brought $86.3 million on Wednesday night at Sotheby’s, becoming the most expensive work of contemporary art ever sold at auction and a retort to doomsayers who had predicted that the art market would falter seriously this season because of broad economic anxieties.
MAY 16- PHILLIPS CONTEMPORARY DOES $59,345,000, with 55 of 64 lots selling, or almost 86 percent. Top lots included Jean-Michel Basquiat’s 1981 Untitled (Fallen Angel), which sold for $11,241,000; Jeff Koons’ 1991 marble Self-Portrait, which sold for $7,545,000; and Gerhard Richter’s 1986 Abstraktes Bild 610-1, which sold for $4,521,000.
