Sotheby’s kicked off the autumn art auction season in New York by selling the private collection of self-made billionaire Alfred Taubman valued at more than $375 million.
The American real estate mogul was a former chairman of Sotheby’s, who turned the auction house around but briefly went to prison in 2002 for price fixing. He always maintained his innocence.
The son of Polish immigrants, he made a fortune by developing and building shopping malls. He was a prominent philanthropist, as well as businessman, who built up a staggering art collection.
The top selling lot was Amedeo Modigliani’s 1919 “Portrait of Paulette Jourdain,” which fetched $42.81 million, Sotheby’s said.
Jourdain was the housemaid and later the lover of his dealer Leopold Zborowski. It was one of the Italian artist’s last paintings.
Another highlight was Willem de Kooning’s 1976 landscape “Untitled XXI” sold for $24.89 million, scraping its lowest pre-sale estimate of $25 million.
But several lots fell even shorter of their pre-sale estimates
Pablo Picasso’s “Femme assise sur une chaise” a portrait of his lover, Dora Maar, once owned by Gianni Versace, the murdered Italian fashion designer, sold under budget at $20 million.
Sotheby’s had valued the oil painting at $25 to $35 million.
But the sale did set a world record price at auction for artist Frank Stella, whose “Delaware Crossing” sold for $13.69 million.
Wednesday’s sale featured 77 lots of modern, impressionist, post-war and contemporary pieces, which the auction house had given a pre-sale value of $375 million to $527 million.
Taubman died in April aged 91.
He was convicted in a New York federal court of colluding with a counterpart at Christie’s in a conspiracy that US prosecutors claimed cheated customers out of $100 million.
The rival auction houses go head to head in a week of auction sales six months after the spring season smashed a string of records and netted more than $2.6 billion for Christie’s and Sotheby’s.
Fuelled by rising demand from Asia and the Gulf, it set a new record for a work of art sold at auction — $179.4 million for a Picasso.
The most expensive lots this season are a sumptuous nude by Modigliani valued at $100 million and a pop art masterpiece from Roy Lichtenstein estimated at $80 million, both to go under the hammer at Christie’s.