Botero and Rivera lead Christie's Latin American art auction
Diego Rivera - La Bordadora - 1928Tomas Sanchez - Llegada del caminante a la laguna - 1999
Summary of the Latin American art auction at Christie's New York on 11 March 2022, highlighted by works by Fernando Botero, Diego Rivera and Tomás Sánchez.
G. Fernández ·· theartwolf.com ·· Images: Diego Rivera, "La bordadora", 1928. Oil on canvas, 79.4 x 99.1 cm. ·· Tomás Sánchez, " Llegada del caminante a la laguna” (Arrival of the Walker at the Lagoon), 1999. Oil on canvas, 200 x 252.3 cm. © Tomás Sánchez
The auction, which raised $27.7 million, was led by "Man on a Horse", a sculpture created in 1999 by Fernando Botero. Christie's reproduces on its website a text by Abby McEwen, professor at the University of Maryland, who maintains -quite enthusiastically- that this sculpture by Botero "descends from a long lineage of bronze equestrian statues, from Marcus Aurelius in Rome to Donatello’s Gattamelata in Padua". Quite enthusiastic, indeed. In any case, the monumental -and certainly remarkable- work, 3.5 metres high, was auctioned for $4.3 million, a record for the artist.
But while the Botero was the highest-priced work, the big winner of the auction was Diego Rivera, whose “La bordadora” (The Embroiderer) far exceeded its pre-sale estimate of between $700,000 and $900,000, fetching $4.14 million. The work, which had been in a private collection in New Orleans practically since it was painted, shows, according to Christie's, "cubist influences", and going even further back in time the comparison with Cézanne's "The Card Players" is tempting, though possibly overly ambitious. "La bordadora" was painted in 1928, the same year in which Rivera created "Baile en Tehuantepec", one of his undisputed masterpieces, acquired in 2016 by Eduardo F. Costantini for $15.6 million.
Tomás Sánchez's monumental landscapes, such as "Llegada del caminante a la laguna" (1999) are masterpieces of Magical Realism, worthy companions to the novels of Gabriel García Márquez, who, appropriately enough, wrote the prologue to the artist's illustrated catalogue. “Llegada del caminante a la laguna” (Arrival of the Walker at the Lagoon) had a pre-sale estimate of between $750,000 and $950,000 and sold for $1.8 million, a fair price for a marvellous work of art.
The auction also included several paintings by Roberto Matta, of which "L'unité absolue" was undoubtedly the most important. Painted in 1942, a time when Matta, along with Arshile Gorky and Hans Hofmann, paved the way for Abstract Expressionism, the painting far exceeded its pre-sale estimate, auctioning for $882,500. "Apollo in the Temple of Michael Rat”, a small and very interesting painting by Leonora Carrington, was auctioned for $378,000, more than five times its most optimistic pre-sale estimate.

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