[LINK] "Lawren Harris ‘Mountain Forms’ painting sells for record $11.2-million"

[rfmcdonald]

The Globe and Mail's Brad Wheeler describes how Harris' Mountain Forms sold.

A mountain was moved on Wednesday evening, and at a staggering record price. Lawren Harris’s Mountain Forms, a serene essay in blue, grey and white, sold in Toronto for $11.21-million, making it the most expensive work by a Canadian artist ever sold at auction.

The sale obliterated the previous record (of $5.062-million) for a Canadian painting, held for almost 15 years by Paul Kane’s 1845 Scene in the Northwest: Portrait of John Henry Lefroy.

In a packed room for the Heffel Fine Art Auction House fall auction, held in the former home of the Toronto Stock Exchange, bidding was fierce for Mountain Forms, jumping forward at $500,000 increments once the price reached $5-million.

The action was mostly carried by phone bidders, but eventually an anonymous paddle-waver in the room won out. It was one quick crack of the hammer, according to David Heffel, the auctioneer and Heffel president, “and one giant leap for the Canadian art market.”

Indeed, the record price (of $9.5-million on the hammer, plus an 18-per-cent premium) easily eclipsed the pre-auction estimate of $3-million to $5-million.