Christie’s painted the walls of the viewings rooms deep gray, doubtless to show their lots to the best effect. They were lit Las Vegas style, to the edge of the frame, and that made them seem electro-luminescent. Viewers moved from chapel to chapel in the dimness, between pools of reflected light. Here, van Gogh’s L’Arlésienne; there, laid out like a pharaoh, the 1956 Henry Moore Reclining Figure; over there, the tiny Picasso Blue Period icon, Portrait de Germaine; and back in the catacombs, stacked up like so many skulls, sad Monets, Pissarros and Lautrecs. They might have turned the lights still lower and spared us.
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