Art Market: Buyers develop a taste for kitchen art

A KITCHEN table and cabinet stuffed with egg-shells sold for pounds 396,000 yesterday and a casserole pot brimming with empty mussel shells found a buyer at pounds 176,000. Judging from the crowds, it might have been Harrods' kitchen sale. But this was not bargain-basement time.

These were works of art by the Belgian surrealist Marcel Broodthaers (1924-76), brought to auction at Christie's. Their respective upper estimates were pounds 120,000 and pounds 20,000.

Christie's was far from surprised by the results. There was strong pre- sale interest. All nine Broodthaers, which were displayed in major exhibitions in Paris and Madrid last year, broke the artist's record.

The pieces reflected his interest in found objects. A sculpture that could be mistaken for an ordinary workman's ladder piled up with some bricks sold for pounds 132,000, against an expected pounds 25,000 to pounds 35,000; a cage enclosing broken egg-shells sold for pounds 48,400, more than doubling the estimate; and a canvas encrusted with mussel shells sold for pounds 88,000 (upper estimate, pounds 35,000).

Gerard Faggionato, of Christie's, said: 'This was the best single collection of Broodthaers to come on to the market. There's never been anything like it. It came directly from the artist in the Sixties.'

They were among 23 works from the estate of Frederik Roos, the Swedish tycoon who died of Aids last June. He was 18 when he bought his first work, a Miro, after his parents gave him some money for not smoking.

His art collection is believed to have included 1,800 works at the time of his death. It is being sold to pay his debts; the first part was sold by Christie's in New York last May.

Roos concentrated on contemporary artists. Among his favourites was Anselm Kiefer, one of Germany's leading artists for whom the holocaust and environmental disaster are recurring themes. Christie's yesterday sold Grab des Unbekannten Malers for pounds 88,000, within estimate.

In the same sale, Francis Bacon's Portrait of Isabel Rawsthorne, the first work to come to auction since his death earlier this year, sold for pounds 110,000.

However, the 1971 portrait of a woman who sat for Bacon on many occasions, and who also inspired Picasso and Derain to put paint to canvas, fell well short of its estimate, pounds 180,000 to pounds 240,000.

Only nine of the 79 works failed to sell. The unsold percentage at Sotheby's contemporary art sale was higher: the auction's star turn, Naked Girl Asleep I by Lucian Freud, which estimated at pounds 350,000 to pounds 450,000, was among 23 of 73 works that did not make their reserves.

However, there was some keen bidding. Lucio Fontana's La Fine Di Dio, one of his rare egg-shaped slashed canvases, was sold to an anonymous buyer for pounds 319,000, just above estimate.

Christie's in South Kensington also had an egg on its auction menu. This one was a fossilised dinosaur egg, more than 70 million years old, and probably laid by the great sauropod dinosaur, Hypselosaurus.

It was bought by a Dutch buyer at the scientific and medical sale for pounds 5,500.

(Photographs omitted)