Among other wins for women artists on Wednesday night, the 21st-century Evening Sale at Christie’s New York made art market history with the record-setting sale of Miss January by contemporary South African painter Marlene Dumas. Hammering in at $13.6 million with fees, the 1997 painting is now the most expensive work by a living female artist sold on the secondary market.
Yesterday’s auction highs follow Monday’s 20th-century Evening Sale at Christie’s, which saw new auction records set by women Surrealist artists.
Marlene Dumas Breaks World Record at Christie’s
Marlene Dumas, born in Cape Town in 1953, is known worldwide for her expressive and often tension-filled figurative paintings. Towering over nine feet tall, Dumas’s record-setting portrait Miss January depicts a confident beauty queen, curiously nude from the waist down save for one pink sock.
Miss January was consigned to Christie’s from the Miami-based mega-collection of Mera and Don Rubell, who acquired it from Galerie Paul Andriesse in Amsterdam over 20 years ago. Last night, it hit the auction block midway through the 21st-century Evening Sale. While bidding lasted under a minute, the painting’s $13.2 million sale made Dumas a new world record holder. The previous record was held by Jenny Saville’s 1992 painting Propped, which fetched £9.5m (then approximately $12 million) at Sotheby’s London in 2018.
Despite swift bidding and relatively little fanfare surrounding the painting’s presentation, contemporary art adviser Abigail Asher told ARTnews, “In this uncertain world, to see an object of such raw power and such feminist presentation reach a world record for a living female artist was really exciting.”
“All the Best Bidding Was for Female Artists”
Another top lot of the evening was Bedtime Story, a 1999 abstract painting by British artist Cecily Brown. Against a high estimate of $6 million, it fetched $6.2 million with fees. One of the evening’s rare bidding wars erupted for Sentinel IV by American sculptor Simone Leigh, who describes her African art-inspired work as auto-ethnographic. The 2020 work sold for $5.7 million against a high estimate of $5.5 million.
Meanwhile, emerging artist Emma McIntyre set a new artist record for her 2021 abstract painting Up bubbles her amorous breath. The painting’s $201,600 sale price more than quadrupled the low end of Christie’s pre-sale estimate. Jarvis and Liam Smoking, a 1997 figurative painting by American artist Elizabeth Peyton, hammered in at $1.6 million against a high estimate of $1.2 million.
“Tonight was a story of women. All the best bidding was for female artists,” contemporary art advisor Wendy Cromwell told The Art Newspaper after Wednesday’s auction ended. “But overall, it was a quiet sale. What we saw tonight was realistic bidding, in a way it’s what auctions were like back in the day—dozens of bids on each work, prices catapulting, that is part of an exuberant moment that we are no longer in.”
