At Sotheby’s auction on Wednesday night, a bold contemporary work that takes its cue from the European masters shook up the art market’s traditional hierarchy of “blue-chip” names.
Titled “Past Times,” by the Chicago-based painter Kerry James Marshall, the monumental canvas sold for $21.1 million with fees. The price was four times the previous auction high for Mr. Marshall, a leading African-American artist, who is 62 and has been painting for 40 years.
Estimated to sell for at least $8 million, “Past Times,” from 1997, drew four bidders and was bought by a client on the phone. The price eclipsed the $12 million reached in March for a work by another black artist, Mark Bradford. His 2007 “Helter Skelter,” which sold at Phillips in London, was widely reported at the time to be the top price at auction for any work by a living African-American artist.
“The rise of African-American artists is part of a broader tendency to re-evaluate neglected artists that’s been going on for a few years,” said Candace Worth, an art adviser based in New York. “Art history isn’t just about the big Ab-Ex guys any more,” she added, referring to postwar painters such as Pollock, Rothko, de Kooning and Richter, who have long dominated the auction scene. “We’re opening a conversation, and the market is playing catch-up.”
Ms. Worth pointed to the influence of exhibitions including “Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power” at Tate Modern last year and “Outliers and American Vanguard Art,” which closed Sunday at the National Gallery of Art in Washington.
“Past Times,” measuring 157 inches wide, showed black Americans relaxing in a Chicago park, enjoying golf, croquet, water skiing and other leisure pursuits traditionally associated with affluent white suburbanites. The urban pastoral subject matter, with picnickers listening to the Temptations and Snoop Dogg in the foreground and boaters in the background, wittily updates sweeping historical works including Georges Seurat’s “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte” (in the collection of Mr. Marshall’s local museum, the Art Institute of Chicago) and Edouard Manet’s “Déjeuner Sur l’Herbe.”