In all, the sale brought in a hammer total of €39.1 million ($43.3 million), landing near the lower end of its pre-sale estimate of €36 million to €52 million ($39.7 million–$57.4 million).

Nicolas de Staël’s Parc des Princes (Les grands footballeurs) (1952), an enormous and impastoed abstract painting of soccer players at Paris’s most famous stadium, was far and away the night’s biggest lot, with a pre-sale estimate of €18 million to €25 million ($19.8 million–$27.6 million).

Bidding was sluggish, with a brief exchange between a bidder in the room and one on the phone with Pierre Martin-Vivier, Christie’s Director of 20th Century Art in Paris.

The client on the phone quickly prevailed, with a winning bid of €17.5 million ($19.3 million), or a square €20 million ($22 million) with fees. The result, which accounted for almost half of the entire sale’s total haul, bested the previous record for a De Staël, set at a Christie’s sale in New York in May of 2018, by nearly $10 million.