CONTEMPORARY ART SETS AUCTION PRICE RECORDS

About $24 million worth of Pop and other recent styles of art were sold Monday and Tuesday during spirited bidding at Sotheby’s, which brought the highest and second-highest prices ever paid for contemporary art works at auction.

An 86-foot-long, multipanel canvas of a fighter-bomber by James Rosenquist, titled “F-111,” sold for $2.9 million Tuesday, capturing the second-highest price for a contemporary work.

“I never signed the painting. It’s unsigned. Maybe I’ll charge a million to sign it,” a smiling Rosenquist said after the sale. The artist said he originally sold the painting for $22,500. The previous record for a Rosenquist was $66,000, set in 1983.

At Monday’s auction, a bidder paid $3.6 million for “Out the Window,” a 1959 canvas by Jasper Johns, the highest auction price for a contemporary work. Another Johns work sold Tuesday for $1.76 million, while one of his drawings went for $880,000, the most ever paid for a contemporary drawing at auction.

On the auction block were works from the collections of the late New York taxi fleet tycoon Robert Scull and his former wife, Ethel, whose flamboyant life style, support of struggling artists, and the dizzying pace at which they procured artwork put them at the center of the contemporary movement in American art in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

They separated in 1974, and their collection was divided. The post-divorce division of their vast collection dragged through the New York courts for 11 years, ending with the award of 35% of their holdings to Mrs. Scull in 1985.

At Monday’s auction, a total of 93 lots were sold from Ethel Scull’s collection, topping $13 million, a record for a session of contemporary art. In Tuesday’s session, her collection brought almost $8 million for 42 lots. Eighty-eight lots were to be sold Wednesday.

“The Scull name had a dramatic influence on the quality of the work offered and the subsequent prices realized,” said Lucy Mitchell-Innes, director of the contemporary art department at Sotheby’s.

Andy Warhol’s painting, “200 One Dollar Bills,” was bought for $385,000, a record for the artist. George Segal’s free-standing portrait of the Sculls in plaster, wood, canvas and cloth sold for $154,000, a record for the artist.

Other records set were: $319,000 for a first Mark di Suvero timber sculpture; $143,000 for a Neil Jenny landscape; $74,250 for a Larry Poons abstract; $49,500 for a Walter DeMaria stainless steel wall candlestick; and $23,100 for Richard Artschwager’s Formica triptych.