Sotheby's Impressionist & Modern Art Day Sale Totals $42.7 Million, Led by $2.7 Million Picasso Painting

Sotheby’s Impressionist & Modern Art Day Sale concluded this afternoon in New York with a strong total of $42,725,525 – well within its $34/47.6 million estimate, and the highest total for this sale at Sotheby’s since November 2007. The auction was led by Pablo Picasso’s Tête de jeune garçon, painted on New Year’s Day, 1965, which more than doubled its pre-sale high estimate of $1.2 million in selling for $2,714,500: the highest price achieved in any day auction of Impressionist & Modern Art at Sotheby’s worldwide.



“Today’s sale saw top prices across a wide range of styles and genres, from modern masters including Picasso and Léger to Post-Impressionist, Modern British and Bauhaus artists,” commented Jeremiah Evarts and Julian Dawes, Specialists in Sotheby’s Impressionist & Modern Art department. “We are excited to have set new artist records for Henri Martin, whose La joie de vivre brought $1,706,500 above a high estimate of $800,000, and André Breton, whose assemblage piece Chanson-Objet – formerly in the collection of Picasso’s lover Dora Maar for sixty years – sold for $866,500 above its $350,000 high expectation. Property formerly in museum collections performed well throughout the day, including a piece by Barbara Hepworth from the Museum of Modern Art in New York, as well as a canvas by Henri Le Sidaner from the Asheville Museum of Art. And in a continuation of the results we saw in yesterday’s evening auction, works by Surrealist master Salvador Dalí and lifetime casts by Auguste Rodin continue to command top prices: Dalí’s Nature morte achieved $1,010,500, while Rodin’s Éternel Printemps, second état, 4ème réduction dite aussi n°4 that was cast in 1905 more than doubled its high estimate of $150,000 in selling for $398,500.”



Sotheby’s Spring 2012 auctions of Impressionist & Modern Art in New York concluded with an overall total of $373,294,025, marking Sotheby’s highest-ever season total in this category.



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