We were pretty happy with the outstanding prices realised for the Robin White prints in our last New Collectors' sale of 2009 - five figure prices for prints in this country are basically unheard of. However, a week ago in London Sotheby's set the world record for a print at auction and in doing so put our results in perspective. Pablo Picasso's La Minotauromachie was expected to fetch 400-600,000 pounds but brought 1 300 000 pounds (over 2 million nzd). La Minotauromachie is widely considered to be the artist's masterpiece of printmaking and reflects key themes of the artist and demonstrates a mastery of technique. The previous Picasso print record was set by a print of the same subject in 1990 which fetched around 880,000 pounds.
The previous record for any single print sold at auction was around 1.1 million pounds for Vampire II by Edvard Munch, sold in Oslo in 2007
