Courtesy of Alive.
WINNER: BOOKSHELVES AND TABLES
Christie’s had a somewhat controversial install of work from the collection of Stefan Edlis and Gael Neeson. Specialists hung one gallery almost identically to their Chicago apartment (sans the wraparound lakeside views) with the Cindy Sherman way up high and a Warhol above a fake fireplace. Very prominently featured were the couple’s furniture pieces, including two bookshelves by Diego Giacometti and two ultrarare Giacometti coffee tables. And when they came on the block at the evening sale, the two bookcases, one after another, commanded fierce bidding wars, flying past their high estimates, the functioning furniture outselling the paintings. It was a bit mystifying to watch multiple bidders chase one of the chicer Giacometti design grails on offer, a low table with fox heads, to a final price of $4.5 million, more than the Princes and the Peytons and many of the Warhols. These things are just part of the game these days. Appropriately enough, I walked into a collector’s living room this week, and there was a Giacometti table.
WINNER: LAUDER WORK ON PAPER
Not just the Klimt—basically all of the Leonard Lauder collection was out of reach for even a mega-collector with a ton of money in the bank. Which makes it all the more charming that, in the day sale, there were a few choice works on paper offered for a cheap-sounding four figures. Lauder bought them from galleries in the ’70s and ’80s: Elizabeth Murray and Joel Shapiro from Paula Cooper, and the Dorothea Rockburne from John Weber. This week, the works on paper all had an approachable low estimate of $5,000. They ended up selling for a lot more—nearly ten times that for the Murray as well as the Rockburne—but compared to the Klimt, still affordable-ish!
