By Carter B. Horsley
This evening sale of Contemporary Art at Christie's, May 8, 2006 is highlighted by a very fine and painterly work painting by Francis Bacon (1909-1992), an early "soup can" painting by Andy Warhol (1928-1997) and an excellent work by Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988) - three works with a distinctly powerful, existential and macabre sentiment. Other important works in the auction are a fine work by Eva Hesse (1936-1970), and a large group of sculptures by Donald Judd.
The Bacon is Lot 59 and is entitled "Man Carrying a Child." An oil on canvas, it measures 77 3/4 by 55 1/2 inches and was executed in 1956. The catalogue provides the following commentary on the Bacon:
"Enshrouded in darkness and framed by the strange gossamer threads of an invisible or transparent cage, this full-length portrait of a man in a jellaba stepping out across a hexagonal patch of warm sun-drenched landscape, is both a rare and unique work deriving from the time that Bacon spent in Tangiers. It is one of only two works in the artist's oeuvre to overtly refer to Morocco and to the important time that Bacon spent there on frequent visits in the mid-1950s. The other work is Bacon's 1963 painting Landscape near Malabata in which he commemorated his former lover Peter Lacy by painting a dark and enigmatic portrait of the Moroccan landscape in which Lacy had chosen to be buried. Situated just outside Tangiers where Bacon used to visit Lacy, this richly colored landscape, had also made a brief appearance in Bacon's 1957 painting Van Gogh in a Landscape. This earlier painting was one of an important and memorable series of 'Van Gogh' paintings depicting the lone figure of an artist walking in a Mediterranean landscape which to some extent also seems to have been born out of Bacon's experiences in Morocco. Rooted in the harsh sunlight, brilliant color and rich textures of Tangiers and (rarely for this time) depicting a lone figure striding across a landscape, Man Carrying a Child is an alternate and more ominous working of a similar theme. Painted immediately after his return from Morocco in the previous year to this series it is a work that clearly informed Bacon's Van Gogh paintings and bears an especially close resemblance to the 1957 painting Study for Portrait of Van Gogh II. According to Ronald Alley, the rare subject of Man Carrying a child --a full-length walking figure--was inspired by one of the Moroccans that Bacon had met in Tangiers. It was apparently a subject that Bacon had, along with many others, first attempted to paint while staying in Tangiers but had ultimately found himself unable to complete satisfactorily. Man Carrying a Child was painted entirely in his Battersea studio when Bacon took up the subject again on his return to London in the autumn of 1956. The summer of 1956 that Bacon spent in Morocco was the first of several visits to Tangiers that Bacon would make during the 1950s. Bacon was ostensibly travelling there to visit his lover Peter Lacy. Lacy was Bacon's first great love and his features haunt the figures of most of the artist's paintings from these years. Indeed, even though the central figure in Man Carrying a Child was clearly not based on Lacy but on a Moroccan man Bacon knew in Tangier, aspects of Lacy's features also dominate the face of the man carrying the child in this work too. Older than Bacon and an ex-Spitfire pilot from the war, Peter Lacy had seemingly sought some kind of an 'escape' in Morocco that was to end with him seemingly becoming set on drinking himself to death. Lacy was by all accounts an excellent pianist and by 1956 had managed to tie himself down to eking out a meagre existence...playing piano in a small-time Tangier bar known as Dean's Bar. Heavily in debt to the bar's owner, Lacy was obliged to 'tinkle the ivories' for the owner on a near permanent basis in order to pay off an amount that never seemed to decrease. Often playing eighteen-hour stints, Lacy would play and drink himself into a stupor, his alcoholic consumption often matching or exceeding any reduction in his debt that he produced at the piano. Bacon's arrival in the summer of 1956 led to the first of many volatile episodes between the two men that would recur with increasing violence with each of Bacon's subsequent visits to Tangiers. Tangiers at this time was the home of a vibrant bohemian homosexual scene. The widespread tolerance of the Moroccan authorities towards drugs, prostitution and sexual promiscuity had led to the town becoming a magnet for many artists and writers. Included among the more permanent residents of the city were the beat poets Allen Ginsberg and his boyfriend Peter Orlovsky, the resident English writer Paul Bowles and the American Beat writer William Burroughs who was completing his first infamous novel of heroin addiction, The Naked Lunch in Tangiers. Set against this background of intoxication and of Beats, boys and promiscuity, Bacon and Lacy's tempestuous relationship grew dangerously explosive. In the summer of 1956 Bacon had written back from Tangiers to his dealer Erica Bronsen that his visit to Morocco had proved inspirational and that his work was taking a new turn. Certainly, the light and rich colors that he found in Morocco can be seen creeping into several of Bacon's works from late 1956 and early 1957 not least the series of Van Gogh paintings from the following year. But what is not certain is how well Bacon was able to work in Morocco itself. Notoriously reliant on his London studio throughout his life, Bacon wrote to Erica Bronsen that in Tangiers, he had already finished four paintings, exclaiming that, 'I think they are the best things I have done. I am doing two series, one of the Pope with Owls quite different from the others and a serial portrait of a person in a room. I am very excited about it. I hope to come back with about 20 or 25 paintings early in October....I feel full of work and believe I may do a few really good paintings now."....In spite of all his talk about how well things were going in Tangiers, his letters to Erica Bronsen also preceded other letters asking for more funds to prolong his stay. Bacon is known to have begun several paintings in Tangiers but only one - the aforementioned Pope with Owls - made it back to London. In a fit of jealous rage one night, Peter Lacy was said to have slashed and destroyed the rest of Bacon's Moroccan paintings, much to the artist's amusement. Bacon too is known to have destroyed several of his own works and to have left other unfinished canvases permanently abandoned in Tangiers....With its richly patterned and textured ground and, for Bacon, its surprisingly vivid color, Man Carrying Child evidently owes something to kind of orientalising influence that North Africa had provided for earlier modern painters such as Paul Klee, August Macke and Henri Matisse. But though Bacon's time in Tangiers evidently played some part in determining the color and light of some of his paintings over the next few years, it played another altogether more important role. Despite all its apparent gaiety and decadence, Bacon's experiences in Morocco and the painful split from Peter Lacy that his visits there also signaled, reconfirmed in him his dark existential view of life and his sense of the ultimate isolation of modern man. The ambiguous setting of this work serves to further enhance an uncanny sense of isolation and alienation. The scene is only illuminated by a strange hexagonal patch of floor that seems to extend into the distance as if reflecting the light from a skylight or a floor from a carnivalesque hall of mirrors. A similar shape to those used in Bacon's earlier paintings of a Dog in 1952 and of the Sphinx in 1953, this richly colored and patterned floor forms a strangely modern stage-like pedestal for the standing figure above it. This sense of artifice and disturbing unreality is further enforced by the wire-like threads of a cage seeming to frame or encase the figure and his shadow, imprisoning his life as if this deceptively free and nurturing man too were merely an insect pinned in a case. The cage, a familiar motif from Bacon's portraits of screaming Popes made throughout this period, is here used as if to capture and frame the St Christopher - like actions of a man that Bacon had perhaps seen crossing the marketplace in Tangiers in just such a fashion. Trapped and frozen in a state of motion like a fleeting snap shot-like image from his memory or one of the Muybridge photographs that he so often consulted, the painting shows a vivid, intimate and intensely human aspect of life as but a fleeting shadow on an empty artificial stage." The painting has been requested for the exhibition "Francis Bacon: Paintings from the 1950s-1960s," which will take place in the Sainsbury Centre of Visual Arts (September-December 2006), Milkwaukee Art Museum (January-April) and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery (May-July 2007) and is being prepared by Michael Peppiatt.
The catalogue noted that this lot had a guaranteed minium price for the consignor. The lot has an estimate $8,000,000 to $12,000,000. It passed at $7,500,000 and at a news conference after the auction Christopher Burge, the auctioneer, described its failed to sell as a "disappointment," one of the few in an otherwise very successful auction. Twelve auction records for artists were set and 91 percent of the 91 offered lots sold for a total $143,187,200. The pre-sale estimates were $113,060,000 to $160,160,000. Almost two-thirds of the lots sold above their high estimate and 40 lots sold for more than $1,000,000. Mr. Burge said that the market was strong and "not out of hand."
The cover illustration of the catalogue is Lot 34, "Small Torn Campbell's Soup Can (Pepper Pot)," by Andy Warhol, a casein, gold paint and graphite on linen. The 1962 work measures 20 by 16. It had an estimate of $10,000,000 to $15,000,000 and was bought by the Gagosian Gallery for $11,776,000 including the buyer's premium as so all results mentioned in this article. It was the highest price at the auction. The consignor was Irving Blum, the dealer, and Christie's had given a guarantee on the lot. "Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup Cans transformed him into an overnight sensation when they were first exhibited at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles in 1962. It was his first one person exhibition organized by Irving Blum, the legendary and visionary, director of the Ferus Gallery. The exhibition featured thirty-two "portraits" of soup cans, each identical except for the flavor inscribed on their labels, these revolutionary paintings were displayed on small white shelves that ran along the perimeter of the gallery in a manner that suggested both a gallery rail and display shelves in grocery stores. Warhol took on the tradition of still-life painting, declaring a familiar household brand of packaged food a legitimate subject in the age of post-war economic recovery. The 32 Campbell's Soup Cans, now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, were the first of Warhol's works to be structured repetitively in a series, and the individual examples, such as Small Torn Campbell's Soup Can (Pepper Pot), consolidate the idea of Warholian repetition within a single work. The Campbell's Soup Cans are a crucial moment in art history when seriality, photography, monochromy and display undermine the role of traditional easel painting. The serial breakdown of the painterly object and its repetition was not just a mode of exhibition, but an aesthetic strategy," the catalogue entry for the lot maintained.
"Collaborating with Edward Wallowitch, a professional photographer, who met Warhol through Nathan Gluck, Warhol's first studio assistant," it continued, "Warhol and Wallowitch worked on projects in which Wallowitch photographed, Campbell's Soup Cans, Coca Cola Bottles and Dollar Bills. Warhol then presented them, in paintings and drawings, either alone, in groups, or manipulated, through tearing, folding or as the as the Dollar Bills, rolled or crumpled. The Wallowitch photographs were the source image for some of the most iconic of Warhol's subjects, Campbell's Soup, Coca Cola bottles and money. Warhol matched the implacable objectivity of his Soup Cans with an equally impenetrable style. His unpainterly, inexpressive technique mimicked the commercial art of the soup's packaging and bore no evidence of the artist's hand in what comprised a radical departure from his Abstract Expressionist predecessors. He traced his images directly from photographs or used stencils to facilitate the precise, mechanical mode to which he aspired, hand-painting within his penciled delineations. His graphic style and slick handling emphasized the surface of the image, allowing no visual penetration and conforming to Warhol's life-long obsession with superficiality. Small Torn Campbell's Soup Can (Pepper Pot) shows a carefully torn label, and exposed metal of the soup can. Warhol had not yet discovered silk-screening; so he traced outlines from photographic images and stencils and hand-painted within these delineations. Leaving some pencil marks visible in Small Torn Campbell's Soup Can (Pepper Pot). To achieve the appearance of the can's exposed surfaces Warhol brushed diluted black casein emulsion in washes that he allowed to puddle and bead. Compared to the sign-like quality of his unsullied cans, those with torn labels have an elegiac quality....Closely related in theme by way of destruction are the disaster paintings that followed closely on the heels of the crushed soup cans in early 1963."
Works by Warhol fared well at the auction.
Lot 41, "Brigitte Bardot," is a very lovely portrait of the famous French film actress. Painted in 1974, it is a synthetic polymer paint and silkscreen inks on canvas that measures 47 1/4 inches square.
The catalogue provides the following commentary: "French actress Brigitte Bardot - the original sex kitten and 1960s icon of liberated sexuality - announced her retirement from making films in 1974. Aged 39 and still at the height of her career, Bardot or 'BB' as she was known in her native France was as beautiful and as famous as ever, her blond hair, heavy eyeliner and pouting lips an instantly recognizable trademark of her free-spirited energy and sexual allure. As he had done with his two other portraits of 1960s screen goddesses, Marilyn Monroe and Liz Taylor, Warhol chose this moment of Bardot's descent from the glare of the spotlight to commemorate and idolize her by painting her portrait. Warhol had painted his portraits of Marilyn immediately after her suicide and even those he had made of Liz Taylor were by his own admission painted at a time "when she was so sick (that) everybody said she was going to die"....In painting Bardot's portrait at the time of her retirement and what many people thought would be a retreat from public life, Warhol was perhaps unconsciously repeating this process. Certainly in his portrait of Bardot he knowingly applied the same formal techniques to her striking features as those he used in his 1964 and 1965 portraits of Marilyn and Liz, using a cropped frontal viewpoint and highlighting the eyes hair and lips with garish cosmetic colors. The fundamental difference between this portrait made in 1974 and his portraits of Marilyn and Liz made nearly ten years before is that here, in this work, Bardot's image has not been transformed into a cold, impersonal and possibly dead, Pop icon or commodity of mass consumerist culture. Warhol appears to be celebrating Bardot as a living and breathing icon - a healthy and active woman. Warhol had known Bardot since the mid-1960s. According to his assistant at the Factory, Gerard Malanga, Warhol's first film Sleep had originated from a plan Warhol had had, long before he ever owned a camera or knew Bardot, of making a film of her sleeping. Warhol met Bardot for the first time in the spring of 1967 at the Cannes Film Festival where he had been invited to show his film Chelsea Girls during the Festival's 'Critic's Week'. Warhol had left for France with a large entourage of Factory friends and colleagues only to find on arrival that the festival appeared to have censored the film and refused it a screening. Bitterly disappointed Warhol decided to remain in Cannes where he attempted to drum up support for Chelsea Girls enlisting pleas from other celebrities and drawing up a petition. Bardot, who was at this time married to photographer and Warhol collector Gunter Sachs, was one of the foremost French celebrities to come to his aid at this time, though Chelsea Girls remained unscreened....The present work is one of only eight paintings that Warhol made of her."
The lot has an estimate of $1,000,000 to $1,500,000. It sold for $3,040,000.
Lot 37, "S&H Green Stamps (64 S&H Green Stamps)," soared past its estimate of $1,000,000 to $1,500,000 to sell for $5,168,000. An acrylic and pencil on linen that measures 20 by 16 inches, it was painted in 1962.
Lot 63, "M," is a large and excellent oil and acrylic on wood by Jean-Michel Basquiat. Painted in 1984, it measures 95 1/2 by 73 1/4 inches. "Race had always been a concern for Basquiat," the catalogue observed, "one that was often forced upon him by the discrimination, both deliberate and accidental, that surrounded him. Even among his friends in the artistic elite, he was acutely aware of the thin line between appreciation and exploitation. All too often he felt that his success with them depended on token efforts, on novelty, on subservience to the establishment that placed him in the position of slave to his paymasters, and he explored this in many of his paintings by creating a varied pantheon of black characters, exploring their history and their heritage. Basquiat was also doing his part to right an imbalance: 'I realized I never saw any paintings with black people in them.'....In 1984 a new figure became increasingly predominant within his work, that of the dignified African, as in M. This is no longer Charlie Parker or Joe Louis, no martyr to the Jim Crow laws or to other forms of discrimination. Instead, Basquiat has found a new sort of black hero, one that has inherent dignity. In M, the anger and vitriol of some of Basquiat's other works has been replaced by a celebration of his ancient heritage as an artist of African descent."
The lot has an estimate of $2,500,000 to $3,500,000. It sold for $2,928,000.
Lot 54 is an untitled oil on canvas by Willem de Kooning (1904-1997). Painted in 1961, it measures 80 by 70 inches. It has an estimate of $8,000,000 to $12,000,000. It was bought by the Richard Gray Gallery for $10,096,000. The work is from a transitional period in de Kooning's career where his palette and brushwork softened and he became more interested in the pastoral.
Lot 50, "Two Women (Study for Clamdigger," is a stronger and more vigorous work by de Kooning from the same period. An oil on paper laid down on masonite, it measures 23 by 28 1/2 inches. It was once in the collection of Carter Burden. It has an estimate of $3,500,000 to $4,500,000. It sold for $5,729,000 to L & M. Fine Arts.
A very strong and striking early work by de Kooning, Lot 58, "Asheville #1," has an estimate of $600,000 to $800,000. An oil on graphite on paper, it measures 14 1/2 by 12 inches and was executed in 1948. It sold for $1,584,000.
Lot 57 is a good oil on canvas by Clyfford Still (1904-1980) entitled "1955-K." An oil on canvas, it measures 113 by 104 inches.
The catalogue provides the following commentary:
"During the defining years of Still's career--and Abstract Expressionism in general - between 1944-1960, Clyfford Still had only five one-person exhibitions at galleries. Of the over 2,000 works the art the artist produced, he only released about 150 works. He rarely allowed galleries to sell his work, and among other restrictions, rarely participated in group exhibitions. When he did show in group shows, he insisted that this work not be co-mingled with other works, and instead be shown on their own. Even museum curators rarely had much input as to which works were shown. Still himself would choose the works, selecting those representative paintings that he felt best illustrated his oeuvre. As a result, it is notable that 1955-K was chosen for not one, but three exhibitions in the artist's lifetime, including a solo show at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, as well as the landmark exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum in 1965. In a rare entrepreneurial turn, in 1969 Clyfford Still sold a group of extraordinary paintings on canvas and paper, spanning his entire career to date, to the Marlborough-Gerson Gallery in New York. At the time, Marlborough was the most important Post-War gallery in the world, representing artists (or estates) of virtually every Abstract Expressionist of significance - including Jackson Pollock, David Smith, Mark Rothko, Philip Guston, Robert Motherwell, Adolph Gottlieb, to name just a few. It would be the artist's last one person show at a commercial gallery in his lifetime. Fortunately, Still did sell some of the most glorious paintings of his career, and one of them is 1955-K. In...[its] painterly quality, mysterious space and rich color harmonies, Still has created a masterpiece of Abstract Expressionism. The crag-like shapes and mountain-face forms, combined with a sense of grandeur and awe-inspiring scale put 1955-K squarely in the tradition of the sublime landscape, a reading that he encouraged....Although the space is ambiguous, the forms suggest a mountain side, with the land rising up at the left edge, and a flash of sunlight in the upper left corner. Thickly encrusted with paint, created with the artist's signature use of a palette knife, the surface itself has a topographical quality. By continually working the surface, laying numerous layers of paint and then scraping them off to show the colors underneath, Still creates a gorgeously rich surface. The edges where the forms meet are always the high points of tension in Still's work, with the jagged forms cutting into one another in a "life or death struggle". He accentuates this drama by...creating halos and white outlines around the forms - for example, the white halo around the black form at the bottom makes the brown form recede, while bringing forward the black."
The paintinghas an estimate of $2,500,000 to $3,500,000. It sold for $2,704,000.
Lot 56 is a large work from one of the most famous series painted by Robert Motherwell: "Elegy to the Spanish Republic." He started the series in 1948 and this work, numbered 130, was executed in 1974-5. It is an oil and acrylic on canvas that measures 96 by 120 1/2 inches.
It has an estimate of $1,500,000 to $2,000,000. It was passed at $900,000. The catalogue describes this work as "a magisterial example" of this series and "an Abstract Expressionist icon."
"Curiously, the series which is associated with mural-size paintings began with a modest drawing, little more than a doodle, measuring 14 x 11 inches. Motherwell was co-editor of the short-lived journal Possibilities and Harold Rosenberg submitted a short, bleak poem for its next issue (which would never be published). Motherwell illuminated the somewhat bleak poem with a simple Elegy (which was named well after it was painted), consisting of three staunch vertical shafts, divided by three black ovoid forms. Given that the publication would be printed in black and white, Motherwell restricted himself to black ink, despite being a brilliant colorist in the majority of his works up to that time. The international event that most affected Motherwell was the Spanish Civil War....More than any other subject, it informed Motherwell's work throughout the 1940s and 1950's in his Spanish Prisoner and Elegy series. According to the artist, works like Elegy to the Spanish Republic, 1974-1975 are both specifically related to that conflict as well as a general meditation on tragedy. Formally, the Elegy to the Spanish Republic series grew out of the artist's earlier works that were dominated by the play of geometric forms. In terms of subject mater, the Elegies have often been seen in terms of power - politically, visually and sexually. The forms have been alternatively been interpreted as a male/female duality with the phallic verticals playing off the female ovoid shapes, as well as a metaphor for the sexual organs of a bull. Assertively frontal and flat, the ovoid are held up (or crushed) by the verticals, and also suggest a kind of abstracted architecture. They can also be viewed, as in his earlier works, as a completely abstract rhythm of loose geometry."
One of the most beautiful and important works in the auction is Lot 46, "An Ear in a Pond," by Eva Hesse, a tempera paint, enamel paint, papier-maché, cotton-cord and varnish on masonite. Executed in 1976, it measures 41 5/8 by 17 3/4 by 7 3/4 inches. It has an estimate of $1,000,000 to $1,500,000. It sold for $2,256,000, breaking the artist's previous auction record of $1,800,000 set at Sotheby's New York November 9, 2004.
"In her brief and tragically curtailed career, Hesse struggled to move beyond traditional notions of painting and sculpture, creating extraordinary physical entities that she termed "non-art". She achieved her unique vision through an astonishing, daring and heightened sensitivity towards diverse and often untraditional materials. Alternatively pushing such media to their limits and allowing them to act according to their internal dynamics, she nurtured art in the subliminal spaces between control and freedom, knowledge and chance experimentation, coherence and fragmentation. An early work, A Ear in a Pond...was conceived on the cusp of Hesse's mature breakthrough and contains the seeds of her iconic imagery and obsessive processes that flowered in her subsequent efforts. Negotiating between two- and three-dimensions via its painted wall-mounted base and protruding pink cord, this hybrid construct features the ongoing engagement between painting and sculpture that recurs throughout Hesse's oeuvre. Germinating her now familiar sexualized iconography, this semi-organic, semi-mechanical reproductive crossbreed bears the visceral tactility and human vulnerability of subsequent works including Study for Repetition Nineteen II (1967). In merely five years between 1965 through her untimely death at age thirty-four in 1970, Hesse succeeded in becoming a pioneering force in Post-War art. She changed the course of sculpture through her unorthodox inclusiveness of materials and fanatic interest in their physical manipulation. Her amorphous, irrational, strangely beautiful, and yet unclassifiable creations speak of her idiosyncratic genius; their fragility of her quickly extinguished flame."
Lot 83 is an excellent construction by Joseph Cornell (1903-1972) that is "Untitled (Celestial Navigation Variant." It measures 17 by 12 by 4 inches and was executed circa 1957. It has an estimate of $400,000 to $600,000. It sold for $598,400.
Yves Klein (1928-1962) is best known for his all-blue works that are not very fascinating, but Lot 40, "Ant 127," is a bold, beautiful and very painterly abstraction that resembles a curved exclamation point. Pigment on paper laid on canvas, it measures 88 1/2 by 57 1/4 inches and was executed in 1960, the year the artist started his "Anthropometrie," the process of dragging nude women smeared in deep blue paint across a canvas on the floor.
The catalogue observes that the artist saw blue as "infinity and the sublime, "the color of the sky, which Klein had years ealier claimed as his first work of art; it was the color of space and of boundlessness."
It has an ambitious estimate of $4,500,000 to $6,500,000. It sold for $4,048,000.
Another Klein work from the same year is Lot 45, "RE 46 (SIII)," sponges, pebbles, and dry pigment in synthetic resin on board, 57 by 45 1/4 inches. The monochromaic deep blue work has the same estimate as Lot 40. This lot sold for $4,720,000.
Lot 44 is a quite lovely oil on canvas entitled "Coupure" by Lucio Fontana (1899-1968). It measures 45 1/2 by 35 inches and was executed in 1961. It has an estimateof $1,200,000 to $1,800,000. It sold for $2,704,000, breaking the artist's previous auction record of $2,303,679 set at Sotheby's in London June 25, 2003.
Lot 52 is an extremely nice mobile by Alexander Calder (1898-1976). "Untitled (Carousel)" measures 28 1/4 by 32 by 32 inches and was executed in 1942. It has an estimate of $600,000 to $800,000. It sold for $1,248,000.
Lot 55 is a extremely strong and painterly abstraction by Joan Mitchell (1925-1992). An oil on canvas, it measures 102 by 78 1/2 inches and was executed in 1969. It has an estimate of $1,000,000 to $1,500,000. It sold for $2,032,000.
Lot 42, "A Neat Lawn," is a pleasant but not very impressive oil and acrylic on canvas by David Hockney (b. 1937). It measures 96 inches square and was executed in 1967. It has an ambitious estimate of $3,500,000 to $4,500,000. It sold for $3,600,000, a new auction record for the artist.
More impressive but gut-wrenching is Lot 62, "Away from the Flock, Divided," a lamb cut in half with each half suspended in formaldehyde cabinets, by Damien Hirst (b. 1965). It has an estimate of $3,000,000 to $3,500,000. The work was "executed" in 1995. It sold for $3,376,000, breaking the artist's former auction record of $2,225,899 set at Sotheby's in London October 18, 2004. "At the helm of the Young British Artists movement," the catalogue entry maintains, "Damien Hirst has risen to prominence through his notorious fascination with the inevitability of death, the fragility of life and the human desire for immortality. Famously encasing a dead shark in formaldehyde, suspending sliced cows, sheep, pigs and decapitated bulls' heads in the same solution, placing dead butterflies onto oil paintings and constructing medicine cabinets filled with colorful life-extending pills, Hirst has approached death throughout his macabre oeuvre. He is a Romantic artist dealing with the grandest themes of life and death through the grittiest details. Away from the Flock, Divided is one of only a handful of split animal formaldenhyde works done by the artist in the mid-1990s when these works shocked and fascinated the art world and the culture at large."
The first 26 lots of the auction were selected works by Donald Judd from the Judd foundation and all but one were sold for a total of $24,468,800. The pre-sale estimates for these works were $15,200,000 to $21,700,000. Lot 28, "Ahh...Youth," a 1991 work by Mike Kelly (b. 1954) sold for $688,000, breaking the artist's former auction record of $452,800 set at Phillips de Pury & Company November 10, 2005.
Lot 30, "Untitled (Good News, Bad News)," a 1989 work by Richard Prince (b. 1949), sold for $1,360,000, breaking the artist's former auction record of $1,024,000 set at Phillips de Pury & Company May 12, 2005.
Lot 43, "Achrome," a 1959 work by Piero Manzoni (1933-1963) sold for $1,920,000, breaking the artist's former auction record of $1,800,000 set at Sotheby's New York November 9, 2004.
Lot 53, "Floral V," a 1959-60 work by Morris Louis (1912-1962) sold for $1,808,000, breaking the artist's former auction record of $1,659,000 set at Christies New York November 13, 2002.
Lot 71, "Elements V," a 1984 work by Brice Marden (b. 1938) sold for $2,984,000, breaking the artist's former auction record of $2,472,000 set at Sotheby's New York, November 12, 2003.
Lot 73, "Cage (Combie Drawing)," a 1958 work by Robert Rauschenberg (b. 1928) sold for $1,360,000, breaking the artist's former auction record for a work on paper of $473,250 set at Sotheby's New York May 18, 2000.
Lot 74, "Femme Debout (recto); Groupe de Personnages (verso), a 1947 work by Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966) sold for $1,584,000, breaking the artist's former auction record for a work on paper of $543,322 set at Sotheby's in London February 9, 2005.
Lot 94, "Gelb Lok (Yellow Locomotive)," a 1999 work by Dirk Skreber (b. 1961) sold for 497,600, breaking the artist's former auction record of $396,800 set at Christie's New York March 15, 2005.