A Pablo Picasso 1955 masterpiece went under the hammer for a world record auction price on Monday evening of $179.4 million (£116m).
There was an audible intake of breath in Christie’s Rockefeller Centre auction room in midtown Manhattan, New York, when the bids for the vibrantly-hued canvas of Les femmes d’Alger (Version O) hit $150 million.
At $151 million, Jussi Pylkkanen, the Christie’s president, chief auctioneer and master of ceremonies for the evening, declared: “We’re in new territory”.
Three million dollars later, some attendees simply laughed. And at $160 million - or that historic figure of $179.4 million when all the fees were included – Mr Pylkkanen spread his arms, cast his eyes around the room a final time and brought down his hammer.He later described the sale as “one of the greatest nights in auction history".
That final bid from an anonymous collector by telephone smashed by $37 million the previous record for an artwork sold at auction – the $142 million laid out in the same sale room in late 2013 for a Francis Bacon triptych of his friend and fellow artist Lucien Freud.
Artistic friendship was also a theme on Monday night. For Picasso embarked on his epic project of 15 versions of Les femmes d’Alger as an elegy to his friend and rival Henri Matisse, who died a few months earlier in 1954.
telegraph
