Christie’s Makes History With $853 Million Sale of Contemporary Art

Andy Warhol’s ‘Triple Elvis [Ferus Type]’ Sells for $82 Million

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Contemporary art collectors can be summed up in a word right now: Insatiable. Christie’s International in New York made auction history Wednesday when it sold $853 million of contemporary art in about the same time it takes to watch a movie.

The auction house’s total exceeded its $745 million sale in May and reset records for Ed Ruscha, Peter Doig, Georg Baselitz, Cindy Sherman and Cy Twombly, whose untitled, lasso-like scribbles atop a blackboard-gray canvas sold for $70 million.

Christie’s total easily surpassed its own roughly $600 million expectations, as American hedge-fund managers and Asian entrepreneurs in black silk-lapel suits raised their paddles for nearly everything on offer—and attendees let out gasps on occasion as prices soared.

Japanese polka-dot painter Yayoi Kusama became the most expensive living female artist at auction when “White No. 28,” a milky white, 1960 example from her signature “Infinity Nets” series sold to a telephone bidder for $7.1 million. The work bested the previous titleholder, Cady Noland, whose “Oozewald” from 1989 sold for $6.6 million three years ago.

But the sale’s biggest pop belonged to—Andy Warhol, the market mainstay whose 1963 silk-screen of a trio of overlapping, gun-toting images of Elvis Presley, “Triple Elvis [Ferus Type],” sold to an anonymous European telephone bidder for $82 million. Warhol famously appropriated the image of the singer and actor from a 1963 postcard for one of Mr. Presley’s westerns, “Flaming Star.” Warhol then silk-screened the image three times on a nearly 7-foot-tall canvas painted in shimmering silver, resulting in an artwork that echoes the shaky look of a paused snippet of film.

Seconds after selling “Elvis,” Christie’s sold Warhol’s 1966 gridlike portrait of actor Marlon Brando, “Four Marlons,” for $70 million. This time around, the artist printed a quartet of portraits showing the actor leaning against a motorcycle and dressed as the devil-may-care biker in the 1953 film “The Wild One.” Christie’s sold both Warhols for $152 million, more than their combined $130 million estimates.

Sellers were feeling confident heading into Wednesday’s sale. Twenty works alone carried $10 million-plus asking prices, —and 37 works carried risk-obliterating guarantees staked by house money or outside investors that assured the pieces would sell. The move paid off: The top 10 priciest works in the sale sold for more than $22 million apiece.

Mainland Chinese collectors won a $17.5 million by Willem de Kooning and a $17 million Gerhard Richter, both abstract paintings featuring lush colors. A Lucian Freud portrait, “Julie and Martin,” sold to a young Asian man for $17 million

But Americans held their own, taking home examples by Sherman, Franz Kline, Robert Ryman and Martin Kippenberger. And there were a few boom-era signs of shopping sprees: The European phone bidder who won the $70 million Twombly also took home a $16 million Roy Lichtenstein, “Sunrise.”

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