Christie’s Sales Skyrocketing as Collectors Invest in Priceless Art

Despite a rocky day for the stock market yesterday, it didn’t keep high-end art collectors and dealers from showering Christie’s auction house in green.

Per Christie’s official post-auction release, at yesterday evening’s postwar and contemporary art sale, the hammer fell for 68 of the 71 lots offered, with a total haul of $448 million.

Per the Wall Street Journal, that handily surpassed the total pre-auction estimate of $343 million.

The big winners at the auction? According to the Journal, that would be New York dealer Larry Gagosian, who snapped up the highest-end piece of the night, Cy Twombly’s “Leda and the Swan,” for $52.9 million. Other highlights included a 1963 Francis Bacon piece, “Three Studies for a Portrait of George Dyer,” which sold to a London dealer for $51.8 million; Roy Lichtenstein’s “Red and White Brushstrokes,” which $28.2 million; and a Jean-Michel Basquiat, “La Hara,” which went for $35 million.

(Courtesy of Christie’s)

Even famed pop artist Andy Warhol made an appearance, as his “Big Campbell’s Soup Can with Can Opener (Vegetable)” sold for a respectable $27.5 million and “Last Supper,” $18.7 million.