DiCaprio goes green

[attach id="254186" size="medium"]Elizabeth Peyton’s portrait of Leonardo DiCaprio sold for €775,400 or $1 million.[/attach]

Actor Leonardo DiCaprio and Christie’s auction house raised €30 million through a charity art auction and donations, Christie’s said, with proceeds to benefit environmental and conservation causes.

The 33 works in The 11th Hour Auction, organised by the star of the new film The Great Gatsby, sold for €24.5 million and set 13 records for artists including Carol Bove, Joe Bradley, Mark Grotjahn, Raymond Pettibon and Mark Ryden among others.

A €3.8 million matching donation for three of the lots and additional gifts from donors brought the overall total to €30 million for The Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation, according to Christie’s.

“All I can say is thank you, thank you, thank you,” DiCaprio told the audience at the end of the auction.

Many of the works, which were created for and donated to the auction by the artists, sold in spirited bidding in a packed auction house. Art collectors from around the globe also placed bids by telephone.

A panel of environmental experts and the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation will decide which conservation projects will benefit from the proceeds of the sale.

At the opening of the auction, DiCaprio urged the audience to dig deep into their pockets.

“Bid as if the fate of the planet depended on us,” he said. And they did. All of the 33 works were sold and many fetched prices that were three or four times their pre-sale estimates.

The top lot of the sale was an oil on cardboard mounted on canvas by Mark Grotjahn called “Untitled (Standard Lotus No. II, Bird of Paradise, Tiger Mouth Face 44.01),” which sold for €4.8 million as two determined bidders pushed up the price.

DiCaprio donated Ocean V by Andreas Gursky, which sold for €465,216, and he bought an acrylic on canvas by Takashi Murakami for €542,752.

A portrait of DiCaprio painted by Elizabeth Peyton sold for €775,400 million.