While the rest of the scribe tribe has moved on to parsing tonight’s contemporary auction at Christie’s, here’s my recap of the same auction house’s attempt last night to repeat the breakout success of its similarly eclectic Looking Forward to the Past sale last season.
No such luck.
While the $170.4-million price for the star lot of “Muse”—Modigliani’s 1917-18 “Reclining Nude”—was just as jaw-dropping as the $179.4 million for Picasso’s 1955 “Les Femmes d’Alger” in “Looking Forward,” the hammer total last night failed to reach the low presale estimate and 10 of the 34 works failed to sell.
Here’s my Twitter recap of “Muse.” (I tweeted from my hotel room in Hawaii, where I watched the live webstream, and composed my chain of live tweets and this blog post during my flight back home.)