Christie's Wan and Woeful Night

Alice Neel, "Robert Smithson," 1962

Remember Christie's Wild and Wacky Night? That was then; this is now:

When asked about the prospects for the big New York sales, for an article published earlier today by the Assocated Press, Guy Bennett, Christie's co-head of Impressionist and modern art said:

I think we found the right balance in terms of price points and also the quality of the things we're offering.

Think again.

The 17 lots that failed to find buyers at tonight's 58-lot sale of Impressionist, modern and contemporary works from two collections (the Hillman Family and Alice Lawrence) included the two highest-estimated works: Manet's "Girl on a Bench," estimated at $12-18 million, and former auction star Rothko's "No. 43 (Mauve)," estimated at $20-30 million. Largely because of those two expensive failures, the auction was a paltry 50% sold by value (71% sold by number of lots).

The sale totaled $47.04 million (including the buyer's premium). Hammer total was $40.26 miilion, against a hammer-total presale estimate of $102.39-149.42 million. The numbers speak for themselves. (You can see the prices for individual lots in the two-part sale here and here.)

Of those works that did sell, the majority fell below their presale estimates...often way below, as with Toulouse-Lautrec's "Portrait of Henri Nocq" knocked down at $3.9 million, against an estimate of $6-9 million; and Redon's "Corn-Poppies in a Green Vase," with a hammer price of $530,000 but estimated to bring $1-1.5 million.

One unexpectedly high price (in part, no doubt, due to its subject) was for Alice Neel's "Robert Smithson" (above), which set an auction record for Neel at $698,500 (estimate: $300,000-400,000).

I couldn't "attend" the sale online as I'd planned, because of Christie's very cumbersome registration process, which involves downloading software onto your computer. It's worked fine for me before, but this time, when I followed all the download instructions and still couldn't get connected, I called for tech help (which didn't help), and was told that I might have had problems because the software had been "upgraded." By contrast, Sotheby's auction webcast (where you can view the sale, but not bid online, as you can on the Christie's website) is a model of user-friendliness.

Maybe I'll manage to get things up and running by the time of tomorrow's bigger Impressionist/modern evening sale at Christie's. Maybe I'm better off not watching.