At yesterday’s autumn night sale at Heffel public sale home in Toronto, each stay and on-line motion generated sturdy outcomes, with Andy Warhol’s portrait of Queen Elizabeth II stealing the present. It made $853,000 (all costs are in US {dollars}), breaking the worldwide public sale document for an editioned print by the artist alongside the best way. In the meantime, the painter and Group of Seven entrance man Lawren Harris racked up important figures: six works of his realised $5.5m (all sale costs embody charges), as Heffel took in a complete of $15.6m for the night.
Warhol’s royal blue screenprint of the late queen is one in every of 4 depicting Elizabeth II that had been included in his 1985 Reigning Queens sequence. This specific lot was from the ultra-rare Royal Version, embellished with diamond mud, and carried a low estimate of $373,000.
It opened at $400,000, stalled briefly earlier than bidders stepped it up and after some fierce sparring, hammered to a phone bidder for $710,000. The auctioneer, Robert Heffel, famous that the sale represented a return to pre-pandemic measures, starting the night by saying, “It’s thrilling to have individuals again within the ballroom.”
The 4 prints of Elizabeth II had been exhibited at Windsor Citadel in 2012, for the exhibition The Queen: Portraits of a Monarch. The Warhols had been the one portraits proven that the monarch didn’t fee or pose for. Additionally within the Reigning Queen sequence had been Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, Queen Margrethe II of Denmark and Queen Ntfombi Tfwala of Swaziland (now Eswatini), who had been then the world’s solely 4 reigning queens. Every was additionally the topic of 4 prints, making for a portfolio of 16. Depicting royalty was one thing of a departure for Warhol, maybe greatest identified for his portraits of movie and pop stars.
One other shock in Toronto was offered by feminine Automatist painter Marcelle Ferron, whose Sans titre, which was estimated between $149,000 to $224,000, bought for some 5 occasions the excessive estimate, taking in $1.3m. “Canada’s contribution to the worldwide artwork market but once more proves sturdy, assured and passionate,” Heffel mentioned after the sale.
