Christie's Monsoon Sales on Trend

Christie’s total sales in London during Frieze week were boosted by works consigned by British retail entrepreneur and collector Peter Simon.

Evening and day sales on October 15–16 totaled $155.7m, including fees, with many lots in both backed by guarantees. (An online sale, which closed on October 20, totaled just under $1m.)

Named Monsoon, after one of the two high-street chains Simon founded, the two live sales earned a B+ on the HENI Auction Index, putting them into the top third of single-collection auctions when measured against more than ten key metrics.

On the index, the sales ranked on a par with those held in London by British billionaire financier Joe Lewis, despite achieving half the total value.

The total of the Monsoon sales was 38% above the average for comparable single-collection sales, while the 110 lots offered was around 23% above the historical average.

The evening sales top lot, Francis Bacon's Figure in Movement (1978), was backed by a guarantee. It sold for $22.7m with fees, 22% above its low estimate,

The day sale was also heavily guaranteed, including the top lot: Hurvin Anderson’s Between the Gulf of Paria and the Atlantic: Maracas (2003). It fetched just over $1m, including fees, 28% above its low estimate.

Lots with strong guarantees—where works sold above their high estimates—were 32 percentage points above the average for comparable sales. Weak guarantees, where works sold below their low estimates, were nearly 22 percentage points above average, making for a mixed picture.

The sales were memorable for the four new auction records, three of them for works by female artists. They were for: Liubov Popova ($10.1m); Bridget Riley ($6.9m), and Portia Zvavahera ($406,200). All figures include fees. There was also a new auction record for David Bomberg ($4.3m).

The share of works that fail to find a buyer in a high-profile, single-collection auction tends to be low, and the Monsoon sales were no exception. The rate was almost five percentage points below the historical average.

Simon kept one work back: Howard Hodgkin’s Monsoon, a hand-painted lithograph. He told the Financial Times that it was a memento of floating his company on the stock market in 1998—another personal windfall.

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