Renowned  auction houses Christies and Sotherby's in London this week both present art auctions of great significance.

Estimated sales figures combined in excess of £400 million. Results from the auctions posted

Featuring in Christie's Post War and Contemporary Art on June 21.... 

Andy Warhol (1928-1987) is the fastest rising and most coveted star of the post war and contemporary market and the sale features a number of significant works by the artist including Three Marilyns, 1962 (estimate: £5,000,000-7,000,000) (pictured left).

`My first  experiments with screens were heads of Troy Donahue and Warren Beatty, and then when Marilyn Monroe happened to die that month, I got the idea to make screens of her beautiful face - the first Marilyns’ (Warhol in G. Celant, SuperWarhol, exh.cat., Milan, 2003).

The icon of the screen was rapidly transformed into the icon of Pop Art. Three Marilyns dates from this legendary moment in the history of art.

It is one of the first multiple images that Warhol made of the deceased star, and is particularly rare in its verticality: of these 1962 Marilyns, only one other is recorded with  a single strip of vertical images, and in that case there are only two, in black and white.

Here, though, with the triple repetition, Warhol manages to give this silk-screened image of Marilyn Monroe a filmic appearance, as though it were itself related to the strips of celluloid of her cinema career.

Bruce Bernard

Lucian Freud’s Bruce Bernard, 1992 (estimate: £4,500,000-5,500,000) (pictured above) which is expected to set a new world auction record for the artist*.

With a record £54 to £74 million pre-sale estimate, the auction follows Christies record-breaking Post-War and Contemporary Art sale in New York in May 2007 which realised $384,654,400, the most valuable auction ever in the category, reinforcing Christie’s dominance of the international Post War and Contemporary Art market at all levels.

SOLD: broken the record for a living European artist after selling for £7.8m 

Landscape with Car

The first of only four paintings by Francis Bacon (1909-1992) to depict the plague of war, Landscape with a car, 1939- 46 (estimate: £4,000,000-6,000,000) (pictured above) is one of the very few paintings made by the artist during the Second World War to have survived both the ravages of the period and the destructive violence of the artist’s ferocious selfcriticism.

A mere twenty-six paintings from this era remain today, of which Landscape with a car is one of the scarce and important survivors and which can be positively ascribed to the first twenty years of Francis Bacon's career from 1929 to 1948. Bacon abruptly left his studio in Cromwell Place, London in 1951 following the death of his former nanny and close companion, Jessie Lightfoot.

The studio was taken over by the artist Robert Buhler, who subsequently placed Bacon's paintings on the market.

SOLD: £4.2m

Featuring at Sotherby's... 

Claude Monet’s Nymphéas of 1904

Leading Sotherby's Monet and Matisse Sale in London on the 19th-20th June is Claude Monet’s Nymphéas of 1904 (illustrated above). Not seen in public since 1936, this arresting, richlycoloured painting is one of the finest from Monet’s waterlily series ever to have come to the market. Monet’s paintings of waterlilies are among the most iconic images of Impressionism.

Only a few such works remain in private hands, and as a result, whenever works from the series come to auction, they command premium prices: Bassin aux nymphéas et sentier au bord de l’eau of 1900 was sold at Sotheby’s London in 1998, achieving £19.8 million ($33 million), still the World Record Price for the artist. Estimated at £10-15 million ($20–30 million), the example to be offered in June marks a major turning point, both in Monet’s approach to the waterlily theme and to his art in general.

Updated 20th June: SOLD for 18.5million GBP - exceeding estimate but not reaching the artists record in 1998 at 19.5million

Danseuse dans le fauteuil, sol en damier

Alongside the Monet is a bold, powerful work by Henri Matisse (1869-1964): Danseuse dans le fauteuil, sol en damier (illustrated above). Painted in 1942 in his room at the Hôtel Régina in Nice, the work is among the most confident and colourful in the artist’s oeuvre.

It belongs to a group of remarkably strident works, in which the sinuous shapes of the models (in this instance the dancer Carla Avogardo) act as a foil to the strong, geometric patterns of the setting. In the wake of the world record price of $18.48 million achieved at Sotheby’s New York last spring for Matisse’s Nu Couché du dos of 1927, Danseuse dans le fauteuil, sol en damier comes to sale from an American collection with an estimate of £8 to 12 million ($16–24 million).

Updated 20th June: SOLD for 10,996,000 GBP, reaching it upper estimed price. 

Francis Bacon Self Portrait, 1978

Spearheading the Comtemporary Art sale at Sotheby's on June 21 is the most important self portrait by Francis Bacon (1909-92) to have ever come to auction. His sublime Self Portrait, painted in 1978, estimated at 8-12 million, is an iconic image of one of the most influential figurative painters of the late 20th century.

One of approximately 14 large scale single panel self-portraits, of which this is the first to appear at auction, it combines the sinuous paint handling, visceral intensity and psychological depth characteristic of his mature oeuvre. The work is estimated at £8-12 million.

The inclusion of this masterpiece follows on from the unprecedented success of Bacon’s Study from Innocent X, which was sold at Sotheby’s New York in May 2007 for a world record price of $52.6 million.

SOLD: sold for £7.8m reaching upper estimated limits

Damien Hirst, Lullaby Spring (detail), 2002, estimate: £3-4 million

Continuing the grand tradition of the history of art at Sotheby's from Vivaldi to Poussin and Monet to Twombly, Damien Hirst’s (born 1965) Lullaby Spring takes on that most ever present of allegorical themes, the Four Seasons. Executed in 2002, the present work, measuring almost 3 metres in width and containing 6136 hand-crafted and painted pills, is one from a series of four unique stainless steel cabinets.

While each cabinet shares the same formal structure of glass sliding doors, mirrored backboard and stainless steel casing, each is differentiated  by the assortment of pills that are lined up along the razor sharp shelves with the geometric precision of scientific experiment.

Individually cast in bronze and intricately hand painted, the unique combination of life-sized pills in each cabinet designates the work’s title: Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter. In Lullaby Spring Hirst presents a life-giving, polychrome array of myriad brightly coloured tablets, capsules and lozenges in an allegorical celebration of Spring. The work is estimated at £3-4 million.

SOLD: £9.65m, breaking the European record for work by a living artist and showing how popular this artist is.