The art market reopened last night with a resounding bang as Sotheby’s sold $363.2 million in modern and contemporary art through an innovative hybrid sale of a live auction conducted on three continents simultaneously with no direct access to bidders. Even with those constraints, the demand for art was evident throughout several bidding wars between Sotheby’s staffers manning telephones and the occasional online bidder willing to click in eight-figure bids (a record sum) only to lose the night’s top lot to an old-fashioned landline telephone bidder.
The strength of Sotheby’s 93.2 percent sell-through rate for 69 lots cannot be separated from the reputations of several legendary collectors and the exceptional quality of the works of art on offer. Sotheby’s three-sales-in-one-night format of auctions included 18 lots from Colorado collector Ginny Williams that brought in $65.5 million; 10 works from Hunk and Moo Anderson’s collection being sold by their daughter Putter Pence that made $66.3 million; and the 10 out of 11 works from a private collection of Latin American Surrealists and modernists with the title “The Vanguard Spirit,” which totaled $26.6 million.