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In a hushed salesroom at Sotheby’s on Tuesday night, a packed audience watched intently as six bidders fought over Barnett Newman’s “Onement VI,” a deep blue abstract composition from 1953. The winner, a telephone bidder speaking Italian, ended up paying $43.8 million, a record price for the artist’s work at auction — beating out the previous record of $22.4 million, paid just a year ago for another canvas in the same series. Faint applause could be heard from the onlookers.
It was the high point of a solid sale — the first of three consecutive evening contemporary art auctions. Record prices were bid for the rarest works, but for the overpriced or second-rate, there was little to no action.
“The high end of the market is quite deep,” said Tobias Meyer, head of Sotheby’s contemporary art department worldwide and the event auctioneer, speaking of the number of bidders. “People are very educated; they know what is what.”
Of the 64 works for sale, 11 failed to find buyers. The auction totaled $293.6 million, above its low estimate of $283.9 million but well below its $382.9 million high.
Another record price was paid for Gerhard Richter’s “Domplatz, Mailand [Cathedral Square, Milan]” from 1968. Prices for Mr. Richter’s work have been escalating ever since a recent traveling retrospective in London, Paris and Berlin. And this painting, an unusually large example of the German artist’s photo-based paintings — it measures 9 by 9 ½ feet — depicts both the cathedral and the square’s 19th-century shopping arcade.
Until recently the painting had hung in the Hyatt Hotel in Chicago and was being sold by the Hyatt Hotels Corporation. The Pritzker family, majority shareholders in the hotel chain, had bought the work at Sotheby’s in London in 1998 for what was then a record price for Mr. Richter at auction, $3.6 million. On Tuesday night, Donald L. Bryant, a New York businessman, bought it for $33 million or $37.1 million with fees. (It had been estimated to fetch $30 million to $40 million.) It was a record price, beating the $34.2 million set at Sotheby’s in London in October for an abstract canvas that had belonged to Eric Clapton. After the sale Mr. Bryant said he planned to hang it in a house he is building in the Napa Valley.
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