Pritzkers’ prize works drive New York demand

Supply meets demand summed up the New York marquee sales and the Pritzker auction in particular.

Jay Pritzker was more than a savvy hotelier and architecture champion, see the prize that bears the family name. The Chicago businessman who turned the Hyatt into a global brand and his wife, Cindy, built a remarkable collection of modern art.

Some of their best paintings went under the hammer at Sotheby’s on November 20. The Pritzker sale was one of four single-collection auctions held in a marquee week, three of which were at the auction house.

The Pritzker sale scored a C on the HENI Auction Index, edging ahead of the Weis single-collection sale at Christie’s earlier in the week. The score is based on 10+ metrics, including but not only total revenue. The Pritzkers’ 13 works fetched $109m—half the Weises’ $209m total—yet the Chicago collectors came out ahead on the index.

The Pritzker auction achieved its C grade partly because it was a white-glove sale with none of their works withdrawn or bought-in.

Coincidentally, each sale was led by a painting that sold for just over $62m with fees. The Pritzkers’ late Van Gogh still-life of his books, Piles de romans parisiens et roses dans une verre (Romans parisiens) (1887) had a reported $50m estimate and fetched $62.7m.

The Weises’ 1958 Rothko sold for $62.2m with fees. It was backed by a guarantee and its low estimate was $50m.

The average number of bidders was stronger in the Pritzker sale than comparable single-collection sales: at 3.7 per lot versus 3.1.

On the less positive side, the average hammer to mid-estimate ratio was only 1.1, 40% below average. There were more than twice as many lots with weak guarantees and irrevocable bids, when works sold for below their low estimate, than is typical, lowering its score in the index.

The Pritzkers’ Kandinsky was anything but a letdown, however. The 1925 abstract Ins violett, a work on paper from the year the artist arrived at the Bauhaus to teach, fetched $2.37m, 238% above its low estimate.

There were no new artist’s auction records, however, which has boosted other single-collection sales, not least the Leonard Lauder auction at Sotheby’s the same week. The cosmetic billionaire's Gustav Klimt portrait made history, selling for $236.4m with fees, a record for a work of modern art.

Together the Pritzker and Lauder sales, plus the Exquisite Corpus auction featuring work reportedly from the collection of the Atlantic Records’ co-founder Nesuhi Ertegun and his wife Selma, made for a memorable opening week in the Breuer, the auction house’s new home on Madison Avenue.

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