Escher auction in New York yields record amount: $ 7.7 million

An online auction in New York with sixty drawings and prints of the graphic artist born in Friesland (1898-1972) has yielded 6.7 million euros. Auction house Christie’s announced this on Wednesday.

All artworks offered were sold for an average of four times the expected yield. Two small preliminary studies for well -known prints resulted in yields of more than 4 tons in thick auction records for Escher. The pencil sketch for Relativityan impossible architectural space with stairs that go in all directions, raised 429,000 euros, ten times the expected yield. A study for Reptilesa print in which three -dimensional reptile -like figures crawl out of an open drawing signed, yielded even more: converted 448,000 euros. The auction record for an Escher drawing was at $ 92,000, now 78,000 euros.

All works from the auction came from the collection of Robert Owen Lehman Jr., an 88-year-old American filmmaker. Lehman collected rare magazines graph from Escher for almost half a century and also many drawings and preliminary studies. These works date from the collection that the Dutch artist had given on loan for many years to the Haagse Gemeentemuseum, now the Kunstmuseum The Hague. In 1980 the Escher heirs sold part of this legacy to the American collector and trader Michael Sachs. Lehman is one of the customers of Sachs.

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Large in the US

The auction yield goes to a foundation founded by Lehman for the promotion of classical music. A reasoned choice, the collector told for the auction in a press release distributed by Christie’s. “Since Escher was just as passionate about music as I, I trust that he would agree.”

Whether Dutch collectors or museums are among the buyers is a question that the auction house does not want to answer. Everything a spokesperson wants to say is that a third of the bidders and buyers were new and that more than a quarter of the buyers are less than fifty years old. That is a strikingly high percentage. Judith Kadee, curator at Escher in the Palace, the Escher Museum, opened in 2002 in the former Palace Lange Voorhout in The Hague, put in earlier NRC From that Americans are receptive to Eschers boundless fantasy. “He is in the US Larger Than Lifemuch bigger than here. ”

The spectacular result does not fall from the sky. In recent years, the auction yields for Escher have risen enormously. An unhealed copy of the litho Drawing hands (1948) A year and a half ago at the Zeeuws Veilinghuis was hammered at 200,000 euros, four times the highest target price.

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