Following weeks of controversy, the Baltimore Museum of Art withdrew two paintings just hours before the auction while many other works sold near low estimates
29th October 2020 04:08 GMT
Only a few days from Halloween and it was hard to tell a trick from a treat at Sotheby’s back-to-back Contemporary and Impressionist and Modern evening sales in New York, moved up from their usual mid-November dates. Live streamed from the auction house’s headquarters in Manhattan but with the auctioneer, Oliver Barker, on the rostrum in the London sale room, the evening brought in a total of $238.7m ($283.9m with fees) across the two sales, just below a $239.2m-$344.3m estimate, with roughly a 97% sell-through rate of the works offered.