Displaying items by tag: simon shaw

A late landscape painted by Vincent Van Gogh in Arles the year before he died, and one of the last great Suprematist paintings by Kazimir Malevich in private hands will headline Sotheby’s Impressionist and Modern art sales in New York on 5 November.

The auction house, which has led rival Christie’s in the past eight of ten sale seasons in this field, will be selling a group of ten works from a collection assembled in the 1940s and 50s by the Belgian collectors Louis and Evelyn Franck. “This is one of those fantastic post-war time-capsule collections that there are now so few of,” says Simon Shaw, the co-head of Sotheby’s worldwide Impressionist and Modern art department.

Sotheby’s announced that it has named Alexander Rotter and Cheyenne Westphal the new Global Heads of Contemporary Art. Tobias Meyer, the auction house’s former Worldwide Head of Contemporary Art, stepped down at the end of November 2013. Rotter and Westphal have both been with Sotheby’s for many years -- Rotter was behind the recent sale of Andy Warhol’s ‘Silver Car Crash,’ which brought a record $104 million, and Westphal helped launch Sotheby’s new contemporary art galleries in London.

Helena Newman and Simon Shaw will helm the auction house’s department of Impressionist and Modern Art. Newman, who joined Sotheby’s in 1988, was instrumental in the February 2010 auction that netted $263.6 million, a record for a European sale. Shaw, who has worked at Sotheby’s outposts in Stockholm, Paris and London, orchestrated the 2012 sale of Edvard Munch’s ‘The Scream,’ which sold for an historic price of $119.9 million, a record for a modern work of art at auction.

Daniel Loeb, a hedge fund manager who is Sotheby’s largest shareholder, recently commented on the auction house’s need to establish new leadership and more efficient operations.

A cast of Alberto Giacometti’s seminal Grande tête de Diego is expected to garner between $30 million and $50 million at Sotheby’s Evening Sale of Impressionist & Modern Art in New York on November 6, 2013. The work is part of a series of groundbreaking sculptures by Giacometti that personified the Existentialist movement during the Cold War. Grande tête de Diego, which was conceived in 1954 and cast in bronze a year later, will go on view in New York on November 1, 2013.

Simon Shaw, head of Sotheby’s Impressionist & Modern Art department in New York, said, “Of all his representations of the human figure, Grande tête de Diego is perhaps Giacometti’s most radical, visually engaging and emotionally impactful.” While Giacometti’s record at auction is $103.9 million, the world record for any piece of sculpture at auction, the most recent cast of Grande tête de Diego sold for $53.3 million at Christie’s in 2010.

Giacometti’s younger brother served as the model for Grande tête de Diego, which was made following the period that saw the creation of the artist’s recognizable, elongated figures. Giacometti’s works from the 1950s tend to be more solid, often executed with the matiére pétrie, or kneading method, which lent a more expressive quality to the figures.