Displaying items by tag: blackboard painting

Audrey Irmas, a longtime donor to Los Angeles art museums and Jewish causes, will sell a large 1968 “blackboard” painting by Cy Twombly that she's owned since 1990 and use $30 million of the predicted auction proceeds of more than $60 million to help build a new events center at the Wilshire Boulevard Temple in Koreatown.

The 55,000-square-foot Audrey Irmas Pavilion will be designed by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, the firm led by noted Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas.

Christie's London staged a really solid sale this evening that realized £117 million ($178 million) against a presale estimate of £93–132 million and achieved all but five of 62 lots selling. These figures hide what was actually a fairly see-saw event, as 25 lots went for hammer prices above their estimate, three of them for record prices. Twenty lots struggled, selling for hammer prices on or below the low estimates, including five of the top 10 lots. (Estimates do not include buyer's premium, whereas sale prices given here do.) So, while the sale was the third highest for Christie's contemporary in London (the previous high was £133 million in June 2012), it wasn't entirely smooth sailing.