N.Y. Art Auction Sets Sales Records for 28 Artists

A series of contemporary art sales got off to a roaring start Tuesday night at Christie’s as a closely watched opening night auction totaled $62.4 million in sales and broke 28 artists’ records.

British artist Francis Bacon’s anguished painting “Study for a Pope” brought the top bid in the auction of 101 lots with a sale price of $5.7 million--far above the auction house’s most optimistic estimate of $1.5 million but less than the record $6.3 million paid last May for Bacon’s “Triptych May June.”

Next on Christie’s top 10 list was Roy Lichtenstein’s comic-strip style painting “Torpedo . . . Los!,” which sold to Zurich dealer Thomas Ammann for $5.5 million, well above the record $2.09 million paid last November for Lichtenstein’s “I Can See the Whole Room.”

“The market is very strong and it is very broadly based,” said Martha Baer, head of Christie’s contemporary art department, following the successful sale. While Americans dominate the contemporary art market, Europeans and Japanese are strong participants, she said.

Among the few buyers who were identified, Los Angeles dealer Fred Hoffman paid $2.97 million for “0 Through 9,” a small painting of superimposed numbers by Jasper Johns.

Another Johns, “Small False Start,” brought $4.07 million from an anonymous bidder. The encaustic and paper collage is a diminutive version of “False Start,” the Johns work that sold for a spectacular $17 million last November and remains the most expensive contemporary work of art to sell at auction.

Christie’s sale offered 20 works--including the Lichtenstein and Johns’ “0 Through 9”-- from the collection of Robert B. Mayer, a Chicago clothing retailer who died in 1974. Proceeds from the $18.4-million Mayer sale will support charitable programs benefiting the arts, education, health care and the elderly.

After Mayer’s death, his wife, Beatrice, established the Robert B. Mayer Memorial Loan Program. It loaned artworks to about 30 colleges and museums and occasionally presented gifts of art to institutions. She recently decided to sell the collection in order to strengthen the family’s philanthropic activities in other areas.

Thirty works from another Chicago collection, that of attorney Lewis Manilow and his wife, Susan, brought a total of $7.6 million. The remaining works in the Tuesday night auction were consigned by various owners.

Christie’s sale room and two additional galleries equipped with closed-circuit television were jammed with a noisy crowd of bidders and observers. Though the sale contained no single work that took off into the stratosphere, such as Johns’ $17-million “False Start” did a year ago, records toppled routinely.

George Segal’s lasted only a few minutes. No sooner did his sculpture “Woman Standing in a Bathtub” command the record price of $330,000, than another Segal, “Subway,” brought $528,000.

Among other artists whose works set records were Jean Dubuffet ($2.53 million), Richard Artschwager ($990,000), Helen Frankenthaler ($649,000) and Tom Wesselmann ($495,000). Only eight of the 101 lots failed to sell.

Contemporary art sales will continue at Christie’s and Sotheby’s through Friday. Today at Christie’s, about 170 drawings, watercolors and collages will go on the block this morning, followed by an afternoon auction of 210 relatively low-priced paintings and sculptures.

A big-ticket auction of contemporary art tonight at Sotheby’s will offer Johns’ “Two Flags,” a 1973 oil and encaustic painting valued at $5 million to $7 million.