‘Saying Grace’ tops record week of art auction sales in US

Norman Rockwell’s ‘Saying Grace’ tops record week of art auction sales in US

Norman Rockwell’s Saying Grace became the most expensive American painting ever sold at auction last week, fetching $46m (£28m) at Sotheby’s in New York.

The following day at Christie’s, an anonymous buyer set a record for a painting by Rockwell’s contemporary, Edward Hopper, whose Depression-era work, East Wind Over Weehawken, sold for $40.5m.

And yet, as recent sales go, both seem like small fry. Over 48 hours in November, Manhattan’s two leading auction houses saw more than $1.1bn spent on 20th-century art, setting new records for the most-expensive work ever sold at auction, the most expensive work by a living artist ever sold at auction and – with $691m splurged in a single evening at Christie’s – the highest ever total for a single auction.

All three records had previously been broken within the past 18 months, which only goes to show how quickly the contemporary art market is ballooning. The most-expensive auctioned artwork of all, Francis Bacon’s 1969 triptych, Three Studies of Lucian Freud, were sold to an anonymous buyer for $142.4m following a seven-way bidding war. That was about $20m more than the last record-holder, the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch’s The Scream, which was sold in 2012.

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