Monthly archive
17 headlines
Source-linked reporting
theartnewspaper.com
René Magritte’s La Corde Sensible (1960) sold for £13.5m (£14.4m with fees), setting a new record for the artist at Christie’s Surrealist sale. Another Magritte work, Le domaine d’Arnheim (1938), fetched £9m (£10.2m with fees) above its upper estimate. The sale was led by Paul Gauguin’s Te Fare (La Maison) (1892) at £18m (£20.3m with fees), with overall strong sell-through and a high total for the two auctions.
antiquesandthearts.com
Gustav Klimt’s Bauerngarten (Flower Garden), an oil on canvas painted in 1907, sold for $59,321,248 at Sotheby’s, setting a record for a landscape by Klimt. Pablo Picasso’s Plant De Tomates (1944) realized $21,063,935, also a top lot, with other notable sales including Amedeo Modigliani’s Portrait Of Baranowski at $19,811,878 and Gauguin’s Tahiti depiction at $10,351,888.
press.christies.com
Diego Giacometti artworks from Hubert de Givenchy’s collection performed strongly at Christie’s Paris sale on 6 March 2017, achieving €32,748,500/£28,157,160/$34,523,469 with 100% of lots sold above estimates. The top lot was Diego Giacometti’s octogonal table aux caryatides et atlantes, circa 1980, which sold for €4,162,500 setting a new auction record for the artist.
news.artnet.com
Peter Doig’s Cobourg 3 + 1 More (1994) led Christie’s London sale, which totaled £94.8 million ($117.1 million). The evening set new highs for Cecily Brown, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Carol Rama, Henry Taylor, Wolfgang Tillmans, Neo Rauch, Jean Dubuffet, Albert Oehlen, and Günther Uecker, and a record for a joint work by Joan Miró and Josep Llorens.
mondexcorp.com
Wassily Kandinsky’s painting The Colourful Life (Das Bunte Leben) is at the center of a legal dispute over Nazi-looted art. The heirs of Emanuel Lewenstein claim a 1940 sale of the painting by a German bank without the family’s permission, with an estimated value of £65m ($80m).
theartnewspaper.com
The Mosse Art Restitution Project and the Mosse Art Research Initiative, funded by Rudolf Mosse’s heirs and the Lost Art Foundation, aim to recover thousands of works looted by the Nazis. Institutions involved include Berlin State Museums, Foundation of the Jewish Museum Berlin, Berlin State Archives, Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, and Free University of Berlin, led by Meike Hoffmann.
theartnewspaper.com
An article about Sotheby’s contemporary auction where Wolfgang Tillmans’s Freischwimmer 119 sold for £380,000 and Georg Baselitz’s Mit Roter Fahne sold for £6.5m, with additional context on German artists and market performance. The piece mentions Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, Jörg Immendorff and Albert Oehlen as a notable group, and notes the sale achieved £100.7m (£118m with fees) and 70% higher than last year.
news.artnet.com
Gerhard Richter’s Eisberg is noted among top results; the sale totaled £118 million ($143.5 million) for 57 lots with four unsold, marking several artist records. Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Untitled (One Eyed Man or Xerox Face) from 1982 was among the top lots carried a £14-18 million estimate and sold for £11.97 million ($14.6 million) after a single bid.
artnews.com
Cy Twombly’s Leda and the Swan (1962) is being offered at Christie’s as a star lot with a low estimate of $35 million and a high estimate of $55 million. The work has a sister painting in the Museum of Modern Art and hasn’t been shown publicly for over 25 years. A few other works are also estimated in eight figures in Christie’s May evening sale, including Francis Bacon’s Three Studies for a Portrait of George Dyer, Andy Warhol’s Big Campbell’s Soup Can with Can Opener (Vegetable), and Roy Lichtenstein’s Red and White Brushstroke.
news.artnet.com
Cy Twombly, Leda and the Swan (1962) is offered by Christie’s New York with a pre-sale estimate of up to $55 million. The canvas has never appeared at auction before and has changed hands only twice over about 25 years. Cy Twombly, Untitled (New York City) (1968) is cited as a high previous Twombly sale for context, with Sotheby’s handling that piece. The sale is part of Christie’s spring postwar and contemporary art auction.
news.artnet.com
David Rockefeller, billionaire banker, art collector and patron, died at 101 in Pacantico Hills, New York. He was a longtime MoMA chairman and Chase Manhattan Bank leader, with an art collection estimated at about 15,000 works and once valued at $500 million.
reuters.com
Vincent van Gogh paintings View of the Sea at Scheveningen (1882) and Congregation Leave the Reformed Church in Nuenen (1884) were unveiled at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, 14 years after being stolen. Investigators valued the recovered works at 50 million euros ($53.97 million) and linked their recovery to Italian police discoveries; the pieces were found in a villa in Italy.
exibart.com
Cy Twombly’s Leda e il Cigno, a about two-metre canvas using oil, pencil and crayon, is heading to Christie’s New York sale of Postwar and Contemporary art on May 17. The work, created in 1962, is one of Twombly’s versions of the Leda and the Swan subject; a second version is in the MoMA permanent collection. Estimated at around 55 million dollars, it has had only two owners and was kept private for about 25 years.
rynekisztuka.pl
Czy Cy Twombly po raz kolejny pobije swój sprzedażowy rekord? opisuje planowaną na maj aukcję w Christie’s Nowy Jork, dotyczącą pracy Leda and the Swan z 1962 roku o estymacji do 55 milionów dolarów. Artykuł podaje także wcześniejszy rekord sprzedaży Twombly’ego oraz kontekst historyczny wyników artysty na rynku sztuki.
press.christies.com
The press release concerns the sale of the Collection of Chauncey D. Stillman, with proceeds benefiting the Wethersfield Foundation. The collection includes works by Nicolas Lancret, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Edgar Degas, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Mary Cassatt, John Singer Sargent, and Gilbert Charles Stuart, among others, and the sale is announced to occur across multiple spring sales including Old Masters, Impressionist & Modern Art, and American Art.
press.christies.com
Christie’s press release discusses Picasso’s Femme assise, robe bleue, a portrait of Dora Maar that will be offered at the New York Impressionist and Modern Art Evening Sale with an estimate of $35,000,000–50,000,000. The painting, created on 25 October 1939, is described as a searing yet tender portrait reflecting the relationship between Picasso and Dora Maar.
news.artnet.com
Perry Rubenstein pleaded no contest to two felony counts of grand theft by embezzlement related to failing to pay clients including Michael Ovitz; Ovitz sought restitution and Rubenstein faces possible jail time and a restitution amount around $1.14 million with a likely payment of $167,500. The case involved stock or paintings by Takashi Murakami and Richard Prince, with works sold for Ovitz and for Salke, and disputes over commissions and foundation payments.