New Records for Jasper Johns and Others in $231.9 Million Christie’s Sale
05.12.10

It was an all-American moment at Christie’s on Tuesday night, writes Carol Vogel for the New York Times. One of Jasper Johns’s seminal “Flag” paintings, from 1960–66, which had belonged to the writer Michael Crichton, became the star in the auction house’s postwar and contemporary art auction, selling for $28.6 million.

That figure was a record for the artist at auction, and well above the painting’s high $15 million estimate. Before the sale, many had speculated that it would set a record for a work by a living artist. (That record is held by Lucian Freud’s painting Benefits Supervisor, which sold for $33.6 million at Christie’s in New York two years ago.)

According to Vogel, the Johns buyer was Richard Rossello, a dealer in American paintings based in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania; whom he was buying for was not divulged. (Bloomberg’s Lindsay Pollock and Philip Boroff report that New York dealer Michael Altman was the buyer of the Johns.)

Of the seventy-nine works up for sale, only five failed to sell. The evening totaled $231.9 million, above the high $207.4 million estimate. (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.)

Throughout the evening—the first of a week of postwar and contemporary art auctions—Americans dominated the buying, in contrast with last week’s sales of Impressionist and modern art, where Europeans, Asians, and Middle Easterners were the big spenders. Officials at Christie’s estimated that 75 percent of the buyers were Americans.

Flag was one of thirty-one works being sold from the estate of Crichton, who died in November 2008. The writer met Johns in the early 1970s and bought Flag directly from him in 1974. That the painting had only one owner—and a big name besides—contributed to the high price.

Once Christie’s won the brand-name Crichton collection, it was able to rope in other blue-chip property, among them several top Warhols. An old-fashioned bidding war broke out when Silver Liz, a classic 1963 image of Hollywood glamour, came up for sale. Five bidders wanted it, including Jon Colby, a Miami bidder standing by the door and raising his paddle. Christie’s expected it to bring $10 million to $15 million; Colby lost out to Dominique Lévy, a Manhattan dealer who paid $18.3 million. “There will be others,” Colby said after the hammer fell.

And indeed there were. Colby took home Warhol’s Holly Solomon, a 1963 nine-image canvas of the late art dealer, for $5.4 million, a bargain since it had been estimated at $7 million to $12 million.

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