New collectors and old poured into Christie’s Rockefeller Center sales room on Tuesday night for the start of the big spring auctions. They may have come hoping for fireworks but instead sat through an anemic sale devoid of the kind of suspense and sky’s-the-limit bidding that can give these big-money evenings their excitement.
One reason was obvious: of the two auctions this week, Christie’s had far weaker material, with nothing to rival the attention-getting power of Munch’s famed pastel of “The Scream,” which is to come on the block at Sotheby’s on Wednesday.
“A number of people who have been in the market steadily over the last decade were bidders, and some who have only recently returned after dropping out for several years,” said Marc Porter, chairman and international head of private sales at Christie’s, adding that for the most part, the night’s buyers came from “traditional markets — America and Europe.”
The sale, which had been estimated to bring $90.5 million to $130.2 million, drew just over $117 million. Of the 31 lots offered, only three failed to sell.
(Final prices include the buyer’s commission to Christie’s: 25 percent of the first $50,000; 20 percent of the next $50,000 to $1 million and 12 percent of the rest. Estimates do not reflect commissions.)
Christie’s did have its own historically significant image, also a work on paper, but more of interest to connoisseurs than a trophy hunter who might try to snap up “The Scream.” It was “Card Player,” a watercolor by Cézanne of Paulin Paulet, a gardener on the estate of the artist’s family near Aix-en-Provence. A study for the artist’s famous “Card Players” series, it depicts Paulet absorbed in a game of cards. Three bidders competed for it, two on the telephone and a mystery man sitting glued to his cellphone in the second row. It was he who bought the watercolor for $17 million, or $19.1 million including Christie’s fees, just shy of its $20 million high estimate.
Where the watercolor will be heading is as unclear as where it was for nearly six decades, when scholars knew it just from black-and-white photographs. It was only recently discovered in the Dallas home of Dr. Heinz F. Eichenwald, a prominent collector who died in September.
One of the night’s few moments of passionate bidding occurred when “The Peonies,” a Matisse still life on the cover of the sale catalog, was bought by an unidentified European telephone bidder for $19.1 million. Painted in the summer of 1907 while the artist was vacationing in Collioure, a remote fishing village in southwest France, the colorful bowl of flowers had been estimated to fetch $8 million to $12 million.
