20th/21st Century: London evening sales achieve £130,251,700 / $166,591,924 / €156,302,040

On 5 March 2025, Christie’s 20th/21st Century: London Evening Sale and The Art of the Surreal Evening Sale realised a combined total of £130,251,700 / $166,591,924 / €156,302,040. The market-leading night saw 43 per cent of lots sold above their high estimate, with sell-through rates of 94 per cent by lot and 97 per cent by value across both sales.

Auctioneers Adrien Meyer and Yü-Ge Wang led the two sales, which attracted excitement and competitive bidding — in the saleroom at King Street, on the telephones, and on Christie’s LIVE.

The two auctions attracted global bidders, 53 per cent of whom were from Europe, the Middle East and Africa, 34 per cent from the Americas and 13 per cent from Asia — confirmation of the market’s appetite for blue-chip modern and contemporary artworks.

20th/21st Century: London Evening Sale

As spring arrived in the capital, bidders first competed for 47 lots in the 20th/21st Century: London Evening Sale. Nearly three quarters of the works were fresh-to-market and almost one third were by living artists. They realised a combined total of £82,180,500 / $105,108,860 / €98,616,600, selling 94 per cent by lot and 96 per cent by value. The evening’s results signal a strong demand for exceptional quality, solid provenance and fascinating stories — underscored by the dialogues between Impressionist, modern, post-war and contemporary art categories within Christie’s 20th/21st Century sales.

The fiercest bidding of the night was for Michael Andrews’s School IV: Barracuda under Skipjack Tuna (1978), from his celebrated ‘School’ series, which offered clients a rare opportunity to acquire a major work by the School of London painter, a close friend of Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud. The canvas, depicting fish with their shoaling patterns and ‘uniforms’ of colour, suggests a metaphor for collective human behaviour. It sold for £6,060,000 after six minutes of bidding, earning a round of applause and eclipsing both the low estimate of £3,000,000 and the artist’s record set in the same room last March by School III: Butterfly Fish and Damsel Fish (1978).

Two works shared the top price of the sale. Portrait du Docteur Boucard (1928), Tamara de Lempicka’s dynamic three-quarter-length portrait depicting Pierre Boucard, a pioneering medical scientist and key patron of the artist, was offered at auction for the first time in 40 years, and four days before the artist’s first major museum retrospective in the United States travels from the de Young Museum, San Francisco, to The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Adrien Meyer steered the bidding to £6,635,000.

Also achieving £6,635,000, and making its auction debut, was Francis Bacon’s Portrait of Man with Glasses III (1963). The most dramatic of a series of four paintings made shortly after the death of the artist’s former lover, Peter Lacy, the arresting portrait hung in the exhibition Francis Bacon: Human Presence at the National Portrait Gallery in London until just a few weeks ago.

Other strong results were seen for Amedeo Modigliani’s Portrait de Lunia Czechowska (circa 1917-18), a painting made at the height of the artist’s infatuation with the Polish émigrée whom he met in 1916, which sold for £6,290,000; and Between Kilham and Langtoft (2006), a monumental tribute from David Hockney to the landscape of his native Yorkshire. Selling four weeks ahead of an exhibition in Paris bringing together more than 400 of his works, it made £5,122,000.

Franz Marc’s Katzen, Rot und Weiß (1912), an expressionistic depiction of cosmic forces at play in the form of a pair of cats, achieved £4,880,000; and Frank Auerbach’s Primrose Hill — Early Summer (1981-82), which depicts the north London neighbourhood he called home for 70 years until his death last November, realised £2,460,000.

Egon Schiele’s Knabe in Matrosenanzug (Boy in a Sailor Suit) (1914), which formerly belonged to the celebrated Austrian cabaret performer and art collector Fritz Grünbaum (1880-1941), and was offered following a recent restitution agreement with his heirs, realised £3,307,000. Wassily Kandinsky’s abstract Schwarze Begleitung (1923), which had been with the same family for more than half a century, achieved £2,218,000. Both more than tripled their low estimates, underscoring the demand for museum-quality modernist works.

Elsewhere in the sale, lots 1 and 4 saw two contemporary women artists break their auction records with fresh-to-market works: Danielle McKinney’s portrait, Other Worldly (2021), which reached £264,600, surpassing her previous record of $201,600; and Emmi Whitehorse’s lyrical Sea Forager II (2024), which made £302,400 against a previous record for the artist of $177,800.

Jenny Saville’s Study for Pietà IV (2019-20), a monumental charcoal and pastel on paper inspired by Michelangelo’s Pietà Bandini in Florence, made £982,800 ahead of her solo show, Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting, at London’s National Portrait Gallery in June. Representing sculpture, Eduardo Chillida’s 1973 work Estela IV (Stele IV) realised £1,250,000 against a low estimate of £600,000.

The Art of the Surreal

The top price of the entire evening came in the second auction of the night, The Art of the Surreal Evening Sale, which featured 25 lots. The only major international auction dedicated exclusively to Surrealism and Dada, it realised a total of £48,071,200 / $61,483,065 / €57,685,440, selling 96 per cent by lot and 98 per cent by value.

Leading both the sale and the evening was René Magritte’s La reconnaissance infinie (1933). The work explores the visual potential of a mysterious sphere, its form seemingly weighty and solid as it floats gently in mid-air, surmounted by a bemused-looking everyman. Last sold at Christie’s in 2004 for £677,250, it realised £10,315,000.

Spirited bidding continued with Magritte’s early painting La lumière du pôle (1926-27), formerly in the collection of Sophia Loren and Carlo Ponti, and Le faux miroir (1952), the only gouache-on-paper version of the artist’s celebrated depiction of a cloud-filled eye. Another version, which is in the collection of MoMA in New York, recently appeared in the blockbuster retrospective Magritte, at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. The works made £4,880,000 and £1,855,000 respectively, highlighting both Surrealism’s strength in the marketplace and the appetite for defining works by the artist.

A trio of nocturnal paintings by Paul Delvaux, none of which has appeared at auction for at least three decades, drew applause after clients in the room and on the telephones bid for 15 minutes to own them. Nuit de Noël (1956) made £2,339,000 against a low estimate of £1,000,000; La ville endormie (1938) made £6,175,000 against a low estimate of £1,200,000; and Les belles de nuit (Comédie du soir ou La comédie) (1936) made £4,396,000 against a low estimate of £500,000. The last was owned by Edward James and hung in his famous Surrealist mansion, Monkton House, in West Sussex, England.

Two works by Max Ernst, Coloradeau de Méduse (1953) and sodaliten schneeberger drückethäler (l’énigme de l’Europe Centrale or always the best man wins) (1920), realised £3,065,000 and £781,200 — both more than triple their low estimates.

Jean Arp’s painting Amphore infinie (1929), which has remained in the same collection for nearly a century and was bought directly from the artist, achieved £3,428,000, while his marble sculpture Étoile (1960) made £3,065,000 — both more than double their low estimates.

Two oils by Leonora Carrington, one of the leading women Surrealists, also performed well: Sacrament at Minos (1954), which has been widely exhibited over half a century in Mexico, the USA and Japan, made £819,000; and Elohim (1960), an oil and sgraffito on board, which had been on long-term loan to Tate Modern until 2024, made £504,000.

20th/21st Century: London day sales

The Post-War and Contemporary Art Day Sale achieved a total of £14,847,966, with a sell-through rate of 91% by lot and 93% by value. The sale was led by Anselm Kiefer’s Velimir Chlebnikow (2005), part of the artist’s series dedicated to the Russian Futurist poet of the same name. The monumental oil, emulsion, acrylic, charcoal, lead and plaster on canvas realised £655,200. Among the other artists achieving strong prices were Cy Twombly for his lyrical 1962 work, Untitled (Rome), £604,800, and On Kawara, for Dec. 24, 2006 (2006), which doubled its low estimate to sell for £529,200. Peter Doig’s 2020 painting on linen, Lion in the Road (Port of Spain) made £529,200 — one of 30 artworks by 29 leading contemporary artists sold to help build a new, world-leading Children’s Cancer Centre in the Great Ormond Street Hospital, London.

On 7 March, the Impressionist and Modern Art Day and Works on Paper Sale realised £10,192,140, with the top price achieved by Le quai à sable, environs de Port-Marly, a 1875 canvas by Alfred Sisley. The painting numbers among the artist’s Marly pictures, named for the town in the Seine valley, which are widely admired as some of the most striking periods of the artist’s oeuvre and of the Impressionist canon. Other highlights of the sale included a 1900 oil on canvas by Henri Matisse, Homme assis, which doubled its high estimate to reach £730,800, and Fixe (1922) by Francis Picabia, an abstract work on paper, finally doubling its high estimate to sell for £163,800.

Looking further ahead, the Modern British and Irish Art Evening Sale takes place on 19 March, featuring 25 lots by artists including Frank Auerbach, Lynn Chadwick, L.S. Lowry and Sir Winston Churchill. On 20 March, the Modern British and Irish Art Day Sale has 101 lots on offer, spanning paintings, sculpture, works on paper and ceramics.