Christie's New York auction house kicked off a week of post-war and contemporary art sales Tuesday night with a $62-million auction that set records for 11 artists. An untitled 1963 painting by Mark Rothko commanded the top price of $7.1 million. Next came a 1968 sculpture by Alexander Calder, at a record $5.8 million.
Much of the excitement came from the sale of 10 works collected by the late Dorothy C. Miller, a pioneering curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Collectors and dealers snapped up every piece, paying a total of $9.9 million. The top item was Jasper Johns' painting "Gray Numbers, 1957," which fetched $5.2 million.
Record prices for works by sculptor Lee Bontecou and painter Philip Guston probably can be attributed to their critically acclaimed traveling retrospective exhibitions currently on view.
