Sotheby’s sold a Claude Monet “Water Lilies” scene for $65.5 million on Monday, a solid start to a weeklong series of New York auctions being closely followed for fresh clues into the art market’s trajectory.
Monet’s jewel-tone pond scene from 1914-17 was expected to sell for around $60 million, but the piece drew three dogged bidders, with an anonymous Asian telephone bidder winning the work .
The sale amounts to a major win for Sotheby’s, which headed into the auction season under a cloud amid questions about its financial standing during a year when art sales have proved sluggish. Last week in Hong Kong, the auction house inaugurated its new space there by selling Mark Rothko’s 1954 “Untitled (Yellow and Blue),” for $32.5 million—30% less than what disgraced 1MDB Malaysian financier Jho Low paid for it nine years before. The house said the overall, $64 million sale series in Hong Kong met its expectations.
Monet, as a leader of the impressionist movement, enjoys a global appeal that tends to be bankable in good markets and bad. Monet’s auction record is held by a $110.7 million haystack scene that sold in 2019. His second-highest price is $84.7 million for a nearly 6-foot-wide water lily view from 1914-1917 that was sold by David and Peggy Rockefeller ’s estate in 2018.
Like the $84.7 million Monet, this latest pondscape was created using an intensely purplish blue palette—hues that collectors tend to pay a premium for compared with algae-green versions in his famed water lily series, dealers said.
The roughly 5-foot-tall piece’s size also may have helped it sell: Over the past decade, collectors have started gravitating to Monet’s larger, late-era garden scenes compared with his smaller, earlier examples in part because they offer more wall power. Their looser brushwork and abstracted compositions also portend the modern masters who came later. Sotheby’s iteration was the largest vertical water lily to come to market in the past two decades.
“Water Lilies” had also never been auctioned before. It hailed from the estimated $170 million estate of Sydell Miller, a Palm Beach beauty products executive who got her start selling fake eyelashes in the 1970s and co-founded the hair company Matrix Essentials in 1980 with her husband, Arnold Miller.
After his death in 1992, his wife took over their empire and ran it for two years before selling it to Bristol Myers Squibb. The sale allowed her to spend more time collecting art—including a quirky menagerie of animal-themed furniture by François-Xavier and Claude Lalanne as well as paintings by Pablo Picasso, Yves Klein and Henri Matisse.
On Monday, her Picasso “Statuary” from 1925 that depicts a woman sculptor sold for $24.8 million, below its $30 million asking price. Miller had paid $11.8 million for the Picasso in 1999. Sotheby’s aims to sell off roughly 90 pieces from her estate.
Miller displayed these pieces in her $42.5 million penthouse at the Bristol, a luxury apartment building in West Palm Beach. Sotheby’s impressionist and modern art specialist Julian Dawes said her silvery-gold dining room was decorated to complement the jewel tones in her Monet, which she bought in 2001. “It took over the entire room,” Dawes said.
Write to Kelly Crow at kelly.crow@wsj.com
