Leonard Lauder's Grand Farewell to Madison Avenue

The Whitney Museum’s new home is named after Leonard Lauder. After the Lauder sales this week, which relaunched the Breuer Building as Sotheby’s flagship in New York, a plaque in his honor is only fitting.

The auction house's evening sale on November 18 was dominated by the late cosmetic billionaire’s Klimts. A portrait, landscape and a drawing by the Austrian artist totaled just short of $392m, with fees. Claes Oldenburg’s Typewriter Eraser, which sold for $444,500, with fees, led the Lauder day sale on November 19.

Together the sales scored an A on the HENI Auction Index placing it near the top of the league table of major, single-collection sales at Sotheby’s and Christie’s. It fell short of an A+ grade, however, because typically such auctions see ten times as many artists’ auction records tumble.

In the Breuer on Tuesday night there was only one record breaking sale but it was a big one.

Klimt’s Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer was the poster girl of the sale and she did not disappoint. It sold for $236.4m, with fees, smashing the artist’s record and becoming the most expensive work of modern art to be sold at auction.

That said, the sales generated more than five times the usual revenue, despite the number of lots sold, 54, being half the typical number.

The percentages of lots selling above their low and high estimates were close to 10 percentage points higher than usual.

The sales were stellar because the percentage of lots with strong guarantees was much higher than in comparable sales: 56% versus a typical 8%.

The percentage of lots with weak guarantees, when a work sells for less than its low estimate, was also higher than usual, however, 18% versus a typical 6%.

On the plus side, the average number of bidders per lot was 4, 25% above norm.

None of Lauder’s works were bought-in or withdrawn, whereas even in an auction of blue-chip works from a major collection, it is typically 8% and 1% respectively.

The HENI Auction Index is a unique benchmark of auction performance based on a range of metrics. It provides a more comprehensive picture of a sale’s strength and weakness than looking at total revenue and sell-through rate.

Lauder will go down in history as one of America’s great collectors of modern art and his sale in the Breuer was a memorable event.

And yet Sotheby’s sold only a fraction of the art, albeit an extraordinary one, collected by Estée Lauder’s eldest son. He had already given away hundreds of works of American art to the Whitney, his Cubist masterworks to the Met while the Jewish Museum in New York also benefited from his generosity and acumen.

Methodology: for how the HENI Auction Index classifies sales, see here