A Marlene Dumas painting hammered for $13.6 million during a Christie’s sale tonight, making the South African painter the most expensive living female artist at auction.
The painting, titled Miss January (1997), had an estimate of $12 million to $18 million, just about ensuring that it would break a record. It was also a last-minute consignment from the collection of the Rubell Family, which regularly appears on the ARTnews Top 200 Collectors list. It also had a third-party guarantee.
The Dumas portrait sold relatively quickly and was ultimately won by an anonymous telephone bidder represented by Sara Friedlander, Christie’s deputy chairman for postwar and contemporary art.
Bidding opened at $9 million. When it finally hammered at $11.5 million before fees, the salesroom burst into applause.
Miss January finds Dumas revisiting her very first known drawing, Miss World, which she made 30 years earlier, when she was just 10 years old. The title of the painting also refers to Dumas’s first survey exhibition, “Miss Interpreted,” which took place at Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum in 1992, and to her 1988 painting Misinterpreted, which is often considered a self-portrait.
Dumas broke the record set by Jenny Saville in 2018 after the nude self-portrait Propped (1992) sold for record-shattering £9.5 million ($12.4 million) against an estimate of £3 million to £4 million in October 2018 at Sotheby’s London.
The previous auction record for Dumas was for the 1995 work The Visitor, which sold in July 2008 for $6.33 million (£3.18 million including fees) at Sotheby’s London.
Among the top 10 overall auction results for Dumas, seven exceeded high estimates after buyer’s premiums, and six of the sales took place in New York.
Between 2022 and 2024, 15 works by Dumas have sold at auction, but only five went for $1 million and up, and only two of those seven-figure sales exceeded high estimates after fees were included.
Most of the works by Dumas that appeared at auction during this three-year period were sold in Paris, London, and Hong Kong, according to the data from the Artnet Price Database.
The Rubells’ consignment of the painting Miss January was notable, in that the family has rarely sold art from its holdings. In 2013, Don Rubell told the New York Times, “In 50 years of collecting, we’ve put together over 5,000 pieces and we’ve sold less than 20.”
The painting had previously appeared at the Rubells’ private museum in Miami during Art Basel Miami Beach last December.
