Just how big were the May 2015 contemporary art auction sales in New York?

Piet Mondrian's Composition No. III, with Red, Blue, Yellow, and Black, 1929
Piet Mondrian's Composition No. III, with Red, Blue, Yellow, and Black, 1929

Colossal. Monumental.

They’ve been graphed by ArtNews in a straightforward, to-the-point bar chart. No silly icons needed here, just the facts about the money changing hands.

NYC contemporary sales, Image copyright, Skate – image via SkatePress, copyright ArtNews

ArtNews:
This has been an absolutely enormous week at the annual May postwar and contemporary art sales in New York, which began on Monday night with Christie’s setting a new all-time record for a work at auction, when it sold a Picasso for $179.4 million in its special “Looking Forward to the Past.” Above, a brief look at how this year’s numbers compare to May results over the past 10 years. Two quick notes: the more darkly shaded section of each bar is the portion provided by evening sales; the lighter section is the day-sale portion. And for Christie’s 2015 numbers, we included the complete results of “Looking Forward to the Past,” which had a mixture modern and contemporary works and featured that Picasso.

By Stephen Brockelman

As a Sr. Writer at T. Rowe Price, I work with a group of the best copywriters around. We belong to the broader creative team within Enterprise Creative, a part of Corporate Marketing Services. _____________________________________________ A long and winding road: My path to T. Rowe Price was more twisted than Fidelity’s green line. With scholarship in hand, I left Kansas at 18 to study theatre in New York. When my soap opera paychecks stopped coming from CBS and started coming from the show’s sponsor, Proctor & Gamble, I discovered the power of advertising and switched careers. Over the years I’ve owned an ad agency in San Francisco; worked for Norman Lear on All in the Family, Good Times, Sanford and Son, and the rest of his hit shows; and as a member of Directors Guild of America, I directed Desi Arnaz in his last television appearance— we remained friends until his death. In 1988 I began freelancing full time didn’t look back. In January 2012 my rep at Boss Group called and said, “I know you don’t want to commute and writing for the financial industry isn’t high on your wish list, but I have a gig with T. Rowe Price in Owings Mills…” I was a contractor for eight months, drank the corporate Kool-Aid, became a TRP associate that August, and today I find myself smiling more often than not.

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