$157 Million for a Modigliani Raises Hardly Any Eyebrows

$157 Million for a Modigliani Raises Hardly Any Eyebrows

$157 Million for a Modigliani Raises Hardly Any Eyebrows

Amedeo Modigliani’s 1917 painting, “Nu Couché (Sur Le Côté Gauche),” which sold for $157.2 million at Sotheby’s on Monday.

At this point in the art market, it’s hard not to get inured to the superlatives: the most valuable private collection sold at auction (the Rockefeller sale last week at Christie’s); the highest price ever paid for a painting ($450 million for Leonardo da Vinci’s “Salvator Mundi” in November at Christie’s) and what Sotheby’s had confirmed was the highest estimate ever placed on a work at auction:$150 million for Amedeo Modigliani’s 1917 painting, “Nu Couché (Sur Le Côté Gauche).”

The Modigliani barely made it past that figure Monday evening at Sotheby’s, selling for $157.2 million with fees at a sale that otherwise featured what many agreed were B+ offerings.

“You cannot find any more masterpieces,” said the dealer David Nahmad, adding of Sotheby’s, “Considering what they had, they did well.”

Although it was the highest auction price ever for a work sold at Sotheby’s, equally noteworthy is that the painting also carried the highest guarantee ever given by the company. This meant that the auction house was willing to assure a minimum price to the owner, potentially risking millions. Sotheby’s was able to offload that risk to a third party, who became the buyer at the auction.

The scale of the guarantee confirms that buyers can be secured in advance for trophy works. The results on Monday, the first night of the spring auctions, seemed to bear that out — although the Modigliani sold on one bid to the third party without any other buyer interest (despite valiant efforts by the auctioneer, Helena Newman, to bring in Patti Wong, the chairwoman of Sotheby’s Asia, who was working the phones).

“It cleared the mark painfully,” said Christian Ogier, a Paris dealer in Impressionist and modern art. “It’s difficult to get money out of China at the moment,” he added, referring to the absence of bidding on the Modigliani from Ms. Wong. “Everyone knew what was expected. The high guarantees break the dynamics of an auction, somehow.”

The overall atmosphere in the salesroom on Monday evening was muted, with few lots selling above their high estimates at a pace that, at times, felt glacial; 13 lots failed to sell. The only applause of the night was when the hammer came down on Jean Arp’s curvilinear sculpture “Ptolémée II” for $2.2 million with fees, selling to the dealer Eykyn Maclean in the room.

And the price of the Modigliani fell short of the last auction high for a work by the Italian modernist: $170.4 million for the more overtly sensual 1917-18 canvas, “Nu Couché,” which in 2015 sold at Christie’s to Liu Yiqian, a former taxi driver turned billionaire art collector.

Still, the $100 million club keeps adding more members, including Jean-Michel Basquiat, whose untitled painting sold for $110.5 million last year; Pablo Picasso, whose “Women of Algiers” sold for $179.4 million in 2015; and Andy Warhol, whose car crash painting sold for $105.4 million in 2013.

The Modigliani for sale on Monday was one of a celebrated series of nudes commissioned from by his Paris dealer Léopold Zborowski (for a stipend of 15 francs per day). The painting was consigned to Sotheby’s by the billionaire Irish horse breeder and art collector John Magnier, who had bought the work at auction in 2003 for $26.9 million, which at the time was a high for the artist.

The seller sought to capitalize on the painting’s recent inclusion in the Modigliani retrospective that closed last month at Tate Modern in London, where it was featured on posters and on the cover of the catalog.

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