€179.4m Picasso sale marks ‘new era’ for booming art market

The extraordinary boom in the international art market continued this week with world-record auction prices established for painting and sculpture.

On Monday evening at Christie's in New York, Picasso's 1955 painting Les Femmes D'Alger (Version "O"'), from his series known in English as "The Women of Algiers", sold for $179.4 million (about €158 million) to become the most expensive painting – or any work of art – ever sold at auction.

A few minutes later, Christie's also achieved a new world-record price for sculpture when Giacometti's L'homme au doigt (Pointing Man) sold for $141.3 million. A Monet painting of the British houses of parliament, Le Parlement, soleil couchant (The Houses of Parliament, at Sunset), sold for $ 40.5 million.

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‘Le Parlement, soleil couchant’ by Monet sold for $40.5million

Overall, Christie’s said, Monday night’s sale had made more than $705 million, adding: “We have entered a new era of the art market where collectors from all parts of the world compete for the very best across categories, generating record prices at levels we have never seen before.”

Investment perspective Commenting on the sale, Britain's Daily Telegraph published an analysis of the sale from an investment perspective. The Picasso last sold at auction in 1997 for $31.9 million and Monday's price represented a 462 per cent increase compared, over the same period, with prime central London property (up 407 per cent); gold (up 286 per cent) and the FTSE (up 45 per cent).

In the US the Fox Network bizarrely decided modesty should prevail when it broadcast news of the record Picasso sale by blurring out the breasts of the women featured in the painting.

On Tuesday, at Sotheby's, Mark Rothko's painting Untitled (Yellow and Blue) sold for $46.5 million and Roy Lichtenstein's The Ring (Engagement) made $41.7 million – nearly 20 times the $2.2 million it fetched when it last appeared at auction in November 1997.

On Wednesday evening, back at Christie's, a female nude painting by British artist Lucian Freud titled Benefits Supervisor Resting – (featuring "Big Sue" Tilley – a local government worker from London) sold for $56.2 million – a new auction world-record for the artist. Another life-size painting, Portrait of Henrietta Moraes, by Dublin-born artist Francis Bacon, made $47.8 million having last changed hands at Christie's just three years ago for $33.4 million.

Brett Gorvy, international head of postwar and contemporary art at Christie's, said buyers were "willing to stretch and stretch some more to have the best".

Secrecy Who is buying art at these prices? The process is shrouded in secrecy. In a post auction press statement, Christie’s simply listed the buyers of both the Picasso and the Giacometti, for example, as “anonymous”.

In addition to Russian oligarchs, Middle East sheikhs and New York hedge fund managers, it seems newly rich Chinese tycoons have entered the international art market and are especially interested in Impressionist paintings, just like Japanese investors in the 1980s.

In a rare announcement about the identity of buyers, Sotheby's said Wang Zhongjun – a leading figure in China's film industry and chairman and cofounder of entertainment company Huayi Brothers Media Group – last week bought Picasso's Femme au chignon dans un fauteuil. The painting was sold by Hollywood's Goldwyn family for $29.9 million.

Mr Zhongjun also, apparently, paid $61.8 million for Van Gogh's Still life, Vase With Daisies and Poppies last year.

Sotheby's also announced Monet's Bassin aux nymphéas, les rosiers, which sold for $20.4 million last week, was bought by the Dalian Wanda Group, China's largest commercial property company.

Its spokesman, Guo Qingxiang, said the company would "continue to enrich its collection with works by the most significant artists in the world", which must be music to the ears of the international auction houses.