When Christie’s announced that billionaire industrialist Bill Koch was parting with a monumental tranche of his Western art holdings, lovers of the niche braced for a stampede. The two-part sale, Visions of the West: The William I. Koch Collection, wasn’t just one of the most anticipated auctions in its category—it became the most successful Western art auction of all time, realizing a staggering $84.1 million with fees. Within minutes of the start of the evening sale, records began to fall. Seven lots in, Frederic Remington’s An Argument with the Town Marshal set a new record for the artist, achieving $11,847,500 over a $6 million high estimate. Just two lots later, the auction hit a new benchmark for a single-owner Western art sale. And a mere four minutes after that, Remington’s Coming to the Call broke the previous record, achieving $13,285,000 over its $8 million high estimate.
“The market response was beyond enthusiastic,” Tylee Abbott, head of Christie’s American Art Department, said in a statement. “What we saw these past two days is Western Art commanding the art world, center stage.”
For Koch, the sale marked the handoff of part of a legacy he’s spent decades cultivating. Raised in Kansas and shaped by summers on his family ranches in Montana and Texas, his bond to the American West helped shape a collection that included not just artwork but also firearms, maritime memorabilia and wine. (Another record-setting single-owner sale, The Cellar of William I. Koch: The Great American Collector held at Christie’s last year, achieved $28.8 million.) His trove brought together works by art historical titans like Monet, Renoir, Degas and Cézanne, but Western art was always the heart of the collection—the throughline that drew Koch to Remington, Charles Marion Russell and Albert Bierstadt, among others.
The top lots in Visions of the West were a trio of masterworks by Remington, the aforementioned Coming to the Call and An Argument with the Town Marshal, along with Coming Through the Rye, which more than doubled its low estimate to realize $9,950,000. From there, Charles Marion Russell’s Dust achieved $5.8 million, while Alfred Jacob Miller’s The Buffalo Hunt soared past its high estimate to land at $4.7 million. New records were set for five artists in total, with 95 percent of lots sold and a hammer plus premium figure that hit 165 percent above the sale’s low estimate.
Notably, this wasn’t the collector’s first rodeo. His 2015 Visions of the West sale, also at Christie’s, netted $17.1 million and shined a similar light on the market for Western art. But despite the much bigger fireworks this time around, Koch was subdued after the sale. “Though I will miss these works,” he said in a statement, “it gives me great pleasure knowing others will enjoy them as much as I have long into the future.”
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