The Most Expensive Works from New York’s $2 Billion Week of Art Auctions

````Wealthy art collectors and investors shelled out more than $2 billion over five days of auctions in New York, toward the high end of the initial estimate range of $1.6 billion to $2.3 billion.

More than 80% of the almost 2,000 lots offered at events held May 13-17 at Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Phillips were sold. The most expensive work of the week was the $110.7 million Claude Monet painting of sun-bathed haystacks, which took just eight minutes and six bidders to set a world record for an Impressionist work. Contemporary sales were led by the $91.1 million Jeff Koons silver bunny sculpture, which set an auction record for a work by a living artist. The third-highest sale was Robert Rauschenberg’s $88.8 million Buffalo II, a painting that fetched almost five times the late artist’s previous auction record.

Other highlights included a $50.1 million moody abstract from Mark Rothko, Louise Bourgeois’s 1-ton spider sculpture, which sold for $32.1 million—the second-highest price for a female artist at auction—and a $5.9 million SpongeBob SquarePants piece by KAWS, a 44-year-old Brooklyn artist enjoying surging international demand. That was one of 19 KAWS works on the auction block this week.

The high-end art market’s first big test of the year took place against the backdrop of U.S.-China trade tensions and jittery financial markets. Similar sales last year included the juggernaut Rockefeller estate and John Magnier’s Modigliani nude that fetched $157.2 million. The estimates for this week were more modest. Not a single painting or sculpture targeted more than $70 million, though three lots ultimately exceeded that.

The art market continued to make history, setting about 50 auction records for artists, including several for female and black artists.

A 16-foot-wide painting by Lee Krasner sold for $10.5 million, almost doubling the late artist’s previous auction record, while Brooklyn artist Dana Schutz had two record sales within hours of each other on Thursday. A 1975 painting by Barkley Hendricks went for $3.7 million, four times what it sold for just two years ago when it last appeared at auction.

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