|
 Sotheby's brought in $280.2 million from its Impressionist
and Modern paintings sale, led by a brace of museum class Claude
Monet landscapes, showing the world's rich still eager to
collect despite an oil price collapse and talk of chillier times
ahead.
A few blocks away, Christie's ended its sale with a collection
of surrealist works that contributed almost half of the
evening's total of $222.8 million, which included its own
Impressionist and modern art haul.
Its art experts said more Asian buyers were being tempted away
from the soothing Impressionists to the works of surrealists,
which express the mood of unreality, unease and the irrational
in Europe between the two world wars.
Chinese buyers were becoming intrigued by surrealism, said
Christie's deputy chairman Impressionist and modern in London,
Olivier Camu. "It's simmering," he told reporters after the
sale.
The top price of the night was $23.5 million for Spanish
surrealist Juan Miro's "Painting (Woman, Moon, Birds)" of 1950.
The headline work from the Impressionist sale, a Cezanne
landscape, realised the second highest price, $20.5 million.
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"Vue sur L'Estaque et le Chateau d'If" - a Mediterranean view of
sea, sky and red rooftops said by Cezanne to be stacked up like the
design on a playing card - was one of his works that paved the way
for the cubism of Picasso.
It was one of only two works by the artist that British
industrialist Samuel Courtauld kept for himself after he donated his
collection to form the London museum and art institute that bears
his name.
Christie's, founded in 1766 and now owned by French retail magnate
Francois Pinault's holding company Artemis SA, had global auction
and private sales in 2014 that totaled $8.4 billion, its highest
ever.
($1 = 0.6569 pounds)
(Reporting by William Hardy)
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