By Dan Duray 11/15/12 12:01am

Auctions

10 Photos

$33.7 million | Jeff Koons, Tulips, 1995–2004

Christie’s Nets $412.3 M. at Record Contemporary Art Sale

The fall’s auction season in New York is turning out to be a record-breaking one. Tuesday night Sotheby’s made its highest-ever total with a postwar and contemporary auction that came to $375.1 million. And earlier this evening, a Christie’s sale in the same category brought in $412.3 million, the highest total ever for an auction of contemporary art. Led by house auctioneer Jussi Pylkkänen, the lively sale, which topped its high estimate of $411.8 million, saw new records for Richard Serra, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Franz Kline, Richard Diebenkorn, Donald Judd, Mark Grotjahn and Jeff Koons. Mr. Koons is now the second most expensive living artist at auction, after Gerhard Richter. Read More

By Dan Duray 11/14/12 12:38am

Auctions

11 Photos

Rothko

Sotheby’s Contemporary Sale Nets $375.1 M., House Record, With $75.1 M. Rothko in Front

Sotheby’s saw its highest-ever auction total last night during a spirited, two-hour-long postwar and contemporary sale in which auctioneer Tobias Meyer hammered $375.1 million worth of art, including buyer’s premium, a sum that peaked just over the house’s high estimate of $374.7 million for the 69 lots on offer. Fifty-eight of those works sold, for a respectable 84.1 percent sell-through rate by lot, with new artist records for a number of Abstract-Expressionists—Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, Arshile Gorky and Hans Hofmann—and for the 40-year-old painter Wade Guyton. Read More