Portrait of Camilla’s ex sells for $34.89 mn in NY

Christie’s Deputy Chairman for Post-War and Contemporary art Loic Gouzer won it for his client, who he was speaking to by phone, on a hammer price of $25 million that just met the low estimate.

It was a second consecutive steady night at Christie’s, which scored the second-highest price ever for a work of art at auction on Monday when Modigliani’s “Nu couche” soared to $170.4 million, smashing the artist’s record by $100 million. The Picasso remains the highest sum ever paid for an artwork at auction.

On the heels of its historic sale, “The Artist’s Muse”, which combined Impressionist and contemporary masterworks, and achieved a new $170 million Modigliani record, Christie’s focused this evening’s sale purely on Postwar and contemporary art. Christie’s said the buyer was the Long Museum in China.

The Tuesday evening sale of post-war and contemporary art is not expected to garner such stratospheric prices. It portrays the career soldier wearing his sumptuous army brigadier uniform.

Large-scale sculpture, suitable only for the great outdoors, was also very much in evidence, for example Louise Bourgeois’s distinctly creepy bronze “Spider” from a 1997 cast, standing eleven feet tall and positioned directly in front of Christie’s 49th Street entrance. The iconic box Four Marilyns (Four Marilyns) by Andy Warhol, of Series postmodern portraits American artist produced of the Hollywood diva was auctioned Tuesday at Christie’s by $ 36 million final cost. If sold for the estimate, the price would exceed the artist’s current auction record of $10.7 million and set a record for a sculpture by a female artist. The work came from the estate of Arthur and Anita Kahn which brought a total $47 million. Particularly telling was the fact that at $32 million, he immediately began announcing that it was “selling at” that level, which, being far below the low estimate, suggested that he knew there was not enough demand to get it closer to $40 million.

The 28 ¾ by 22 ¾ inch painting, with a glowing, cadmium orange background, was completed shortly after Monroe’s death in August 1962 from a barbiturate overdose at the age of 36.

Notable: A diptych in which the artist’s strong features are intertwined with the more refined chiseled features of his friend, the American photographer Peter Beard. It had last sold at Phillips NY in May 2013 for $38.2 million. A similar version of the work using the same phrase is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in NY. $7-9 million), managed to bring in $63.7 million (est.