Yves Saint Laurent's Seat, $28 Million

by Deidre Woollard (RSS feed)
Feb 25th 2009 at 2:30PM

The hits keep coming from the Paris sale of the collection of Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Berge by Christie's. The three-day sale set records for a second day in Paris including one for the leather armchair shown at right which sold for over $28 million (21,905,000 euros), the most for any piece of 20th-century design at auction. And as Bloomberg News reports, the buyer was the dealer who sold it to the Saint Laurent in the early 1970s.

The chair, is an Art Deco piece by ~~French~~ Irish designer Eileen Gray made around 1917 to 1919. It had a presale estimate of that topped out at three million euros. The second day haul for the event was 101.3 milliion euros which was more than double the top estimate. The sales are fantastic news for Christie's and have brought renewed enthusiasm to the art world (although I do agree with the WSJ's Robert Frank that these sales result, while phenomenal, don't indicate a general art market upswing but rather the impressiveness of this one collection). The sale finishes up today with sculpture and Asian arts.

Tags: art, auction, christies, pierre berge, PierreBerge, yves saint laurent, YvesSaintLaurent