SHANGHAI
Christie’s 20th/21st Century: Shanghai Evening Sale (March 1) marked the auction house’s return to the Chinese city after a two-year hiatus. Inaugurating Christie’s new Bund One galleries and livestreamed across sales rooms in London, Hong Kong, and New York, the sale moved 19 out of 20 lots and yielded a total of USD 35 million, a 50 percent increase from Christie’s last Shanghai event in 2019, before the pandemic’s onset. Leading the auction was Jean-Michel Basquiat’s energetic portrait ll Duce (1982)—one of the late artist’s famed “head” paintings—which fetched USD 14.9 million, below a high estimate of USD 19 million.
Works by early European modernists similarly failed to eclipse high estimates. Marc Chagall’s vivid blue (1968) sold for USD 3 million, missing its high estimate of USD 3.16 million. Fauvist painter Kees Van Dongen’s (1908), a portrait of a woman against a vibrant red backdrop, was purchased at USD 3.66 million, falling short of its USD 5 million high estimate.
