It's not often that the auction room at Sotheby's in Manhattan explodes in a round of applause.
But Tuesday, when a tense two-way bidding war for an ancient Chinese wine vessel from Albright-Knox Art Gallery ended at a whopping $7.2 million, the crowd of about 200 couldn't help itself.
The first day of auctions of work from the gallery's permanent collection brought many surprises, with prices exceeding the museum's early estimates by millions.
After two hours, sales of just 22 items netted the gallery $16.1 million -- far exceeding original expectations of $15 million for all 207 pieces to be auctioned over the next few months.
Albright-Knox Director Louis Grachos was unavailable to comment after the auction but issued a statement in which he expressed surprise at the unexpectedly large take for the gallery.
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"We are glad to know that the future just got brighter for our institution and for the arts in Buffalo," Grachos said in the statement. The sale puts the gallery far ahead of its monetary goals as it seeks to bolster its endowment for the purchase of modern and contemporary art.
The ancient Chinese sculpture of a tomb-guarding monster, or chimera, sold for $4.85 million, setting a record for the most ever paid for a Chinese stone sculpture, according to Joe-Hynn Yang, a Sotheby's specialist in Chinese art. Sotheby's declined to release the name of the private museum in China that purchased the chimera.
The biggest sale of the day was the gallery's Shang dynasty wine vessel with intricate etchings. The vessel sold for $7.2 million to collector Roger Keverne, a well-known Asian art dealer with 40 years of experience at high-stakes art auctions. He represented Compton Verney Museum in Stratford-Upon-Avon, England.
When the price of the vessel began to inch past Sotheby's high pre-auction estimate of $3 million, a hush came over the crowd. Longtime Sotheby's auctioneer Henry Howard-Sneyd calmly took bids in $100,000 increments from a bidder in the back row of seats and from an anonymous telephone bidder.
Finally, after much nail-biting and squirming in seats, the anonymous bidder gave up at $7.1 million, and sighs of relief turned into rapturous clapping.
"Thank you for your patience," Howard-Sneyd said, looking out on the audience with a wry and self-satisfied smile.
"It's very important," Keverne said of the vessel. "The bronze is the main target today. We were targeting something that was particularly unique and we might never get a chance [to buy] again."
The Stratford-Upon-Avon museum, owned by businessman Peter Moores, contains the second-largest collection of Chinese bronzes in Europe, Keverne said, and now shines a bit more brightly.
Before the auction Tuesday morning, Sotheby's uptown headquarters was awash in images from the Albright-Knox collection in galleries and cataloges, as well as on plasma screens. Buzz about the gallery's wide-ranging sales was on everyone's lips.
In the 110th-floor gallery, where collectors and museum representatives can preview the Indian and Southeast Asian art from the collection that goes up for sale Friday, the imposing figure of the Albright-Knox's granite sculpture of Shiva stands guard at the door. At its feet, admirers have sprinkled rose petals and pocket change as an homage to the Hindu god.
On the auction floor, a different kind of homage reigned -- that of a well-moneyed crowd to hundreds of valuable works of art during Sotheby's Asia week. It included works from the Albright-Knox collection, like its pensive Maitreya sculpture, which sold for $1.18 million to an anonymous bidder, and a limestone sculpture of a flying figure.
Throughout the auction, admirers leaned on the massive chimera statue and posed for pictures with various works of art. After the auction, the works were quickly whisked away and replaced with pieces from today's auction of modern and classical Chinese paintings.
Telephone banks lined the walls of the auction room, staffed by 20 or so Sotheby's employees who took calls from bidders overseas or in the curtained skyboxes along the top of the room. Three members of the Albright-Knox curatorial staff peered out of one of the skyboxes, managing to keep their cool despite the rapid and exciting escalation in bids for many objects from the collection.
Asked by a reporter if the Albright-Knox collection represented a typical auction, auctioneer Howard-Sneyd said: "No. It's particularly exciting. Typical auctions are much more matter of fact, workaday, business. This becomes drama. Nobody really knows where the price is going to go."
Yang, the Sotheby's specialist who took telephone bids throughout the auction from a podium next to the auctioneer's stand, hailed the fact that at least two of Albright-Knox's major deaccessioned items were purchased by institutions where they will be on public view.
"The pieces ultimately will go into institutions where people will start to pay attention to this category of art history," Yang said. "The high-profile nature of the deaccessions has in some ways benefited the objects themselves -- it opens our eyes to areas that were previously underappreciated."
In an atmosphere where the nod of a head can mean half a million dollars, collectors representing private and public institutions often became involved in prolonged bidding sessions. The sense of pressure in the room was palpable.
According to James Godfrey, an art consultant and former Sotheby's Asian art expert, prices only will go up from here for the Albright-Knox offerings in five more auctions culminating June 7 in the sale of the gallery's famed sculpture Artemis (Diana) and the Stag.
"You'll see the same interest with the Indian art, Southeast Asian art and the great Hellenistic Diana," Godfrey said. "This transcends any of the sales we've seen in the last few years, in terms of quality."
In addition to the $16.1 million take for Albright-Knox, Tuesday's sales yielded $2.3 million commissions for Sotheby's.
Five minor items failed to sell, with the rest purchased by mostly private collectors and institutions in the United States and abroad.
e-mail: cdabkowski@buffnews.com
