Marquee Week: art's spring season starts in style

Last week was Marquee Week in London, which traditionally gets the spring season underway for the art market. And what better way to do that than to start with a collection of spring-themed prints produced by David Hockney on his iPad in 2011? The 16 digital drawings in The Arrival of Spring sale sold for a total of £4.5 million with Sotheby's last Thursday. What was more, they all sold for well above their pre-sale high estimate.

Hockney produced the vernal scenes in Woldgate, East Yorkshire, and the most expensive of the bunch captures the seasonal rush of verdant vegetation, with trees creating the backdrop. It sold for £486,400, including the buyer's premium – well above the £120,000 high estimate.

Sotheby's realised £154.1 million in total across its four major sales. Works by Alberto Giacometti, Constantin Brancusi, Anselm Kiefer, Vilhelm Hammershoi, Lucien Freud and Andy Warhol all passed under the hammer, but the highest-selling lot was a self-portrait painted by Francis Bacon in 1972.

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Not to be outdone, Christie's total for the week came to £245.2 million, a 58% increase on the haul from last year's sales. The auction house also claimed the bragging rights to having sold the most expensive artwork of the week – King and Queen, Henry Moore's sculpture of a seated royal couple, cast in 1952-1953. Moore took for his inspiration a limestone carving in the British Museum of an ancient Egyptian ruler and his wife. “It is a strange and hypnotic work, the distorted heads evoking symbols of ancient royalty – the beak, the bird, the crown,” says Christie's.

Many of the same names that appeared in Sotheby's catalogues for Marquee Week also appeared at Christie's, including Giacometti, Freud, Warhol and many more. And the remaining three spots in the top-five highest-selling artworks of the week (after King and Queen and the Bacon self-portrait) were also sold by Christie's. Wassily Kandinsky's Le rond rouge (1939) fetched slightly more than £12.5 million, while Les grâces naturelles (c.1961) by René Magritte and Pablo Picasso's Le peintre et son modèle (1964) both sold for £8.5 million. They were all sold at Christie's 20/21 Evening Sales, which made £197.4 million.

Does a good Marquee Week mean the art market is bouncing back?

Bringing up the rear was the third of the “big three” auction houses, Phillips, which realised a total of £20.7 million from its Modern & Contemporary Art day and evening sales in London. Hammershoi's Interior of Woman Placing Branches in Vase on Table from 1900 and Mao (1973) by Warhol both sold for £1.6 million and both fell a little short of their upper estimates. Banksy's Happy Choppers (2006) fetched £1.5 million – the third-highest price in the evening sale. Still, Phillips remained upbeat. That bidders came from 30 countries “[demonstrated] continued resilience in the market for exceptional works of modern, post-war and contemporary Art,” it said.

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