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Saturday, November 12, 2011

New auction record for Roy Lichtenstein with "I Can See the Whole Room…and There's Nobody in It!"



The Christie’s Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Sale (New York, Rockefeller Center), which took place on November 8, resulted in 16 new world records at auction, including: Paul McCarthy's "Tomato Head (Green)" (1994) sold for $4,562,500 (£2,828,750/€3,285,000); Charles Ray’s Table, a multimedia sculpture, which fetched $3,106,500 (£1,926,030/€2,236,680); Louise Bourgeois’s 21-foot wide bronze, Spider, soared beyond its pre-sale estimate of $4-6 million to achieve a new world auction record for the artist at $10,722,500 (£6,647,950/€7,720,200).

However, in a sale where thirty-three works sold for over the $1 million mark, including the first part of the Peter Norton Collection, which achieved $247,597,000 (£153,510,140/ €178,269,840), the star of the evening sale was Roy Lichtenstein's "I Can See the Whole Room…and There's Nobody in It!", a graphite and oil on canvas, measuring 48 x 48 in. (121.9 x 121.9 cm.), painted in 1961 and sold for $43,202,500 (₤26,785,550/€31,105,800), setting a new auction record for the artist.



"I Can See the Whole Room…and There's Nobody in It!" is one of the earliest and most important of Lichtenstein's Pop Art pictures, formerly in the collection of the pioneering collectors Emily and Burton Tremaine.

The previous record for a Lichtenstein work was for "Ohhh ... Alright..." (1964), sold at Christie’s New York in November 2010 for $42.6 million.

Image by Peter Macdiarmid (Getty Images)

3 comments:

Inspired By Felicity said...

Very cool piece of art.

D. Valentin said...

Beautiful art

Megan Petersen said...

That records are still being broken is a very good sign for the world of art and art collecting.