Displaying items by tag: Christie's

This past November, Francis Bacon’s triptych portrait Three Studies of Lucian Freud (1969) sold for $142.4 million at Christie’s, setting an artist’s record and becoming the most expensive work ever sold at auction. Less than a month later, the massive contemporary masterpiece turned up on loan, not at a modern-day art mecca like New York’s Museum of Modern Art (as Edvard Munch’s The Scream did), but on the opposite end of the US, at the Portland Art Museum in Oregon. The painting, which remained on view there through early April, was loaned by its new owner Elaine Wynn, ex-wife of casino mogul and top collector Steve Wynn. Mrs. Wynn, a resident of Nevada, was reportedly entitled to save more than $10 million in taxes by first parking the painting at the Portland Art Museum before bringing it to her home state.

Creditors in Detroit’s municipal bankruptcy have engineered a new appraisal aimed at putting the Detroit Institute of Arts' entire collection in play as a possible chip to maximize the amount the city will be obligated to ante up for debt repayment.

The Detroit News reports that, at some creditors’ behest, the city’s bankruptcy managers have begun trying to place a value on the museum’s entire 66,000-piece collection. That’s quite an escalation from a previous appraisal of only about 1,700 works that the DIA had bought with city funds.

A painting revealed to be a Van Dyck portrait on the BBC's Antiques Roadshow is expected to sell for about £500,000 when it is auctioned later this year.

The work was bought by Father Jamie MacLeod from an antiques shop in Cheshire 12 years ago for just £400.

The painting was identified after show presenter Fiona Bruce saw it and thought it might be genuine.

 British collector Charles Saatchi will sell Tracey Emin’s iconic readymade, “My Bed,” on July 1 at Christie’s. The work, which is quite literally the artist’s unmade bed -- complete with empty vodka bottles, cigarette butts, and discarded undergarments -- carries a pre-sale estimate of £800,000 to £1.2 million, which many people feel is too low considering the piece’s storied past.

Emin was a founding member of the Young British Artists (YBAs), a group of visual artists who first began to exhibit together in London in the late 1980s and favored everyday materials, shock tactics, and wild-living. Created in 1998 following a particularly low period in Emin’s life, “My Bed” earned a Turner Prize nomination in 1999, which sparked outrage among the art world. A year later, Saatchi purchased “My Bed” from Emin’s New York dealer, David Maupin, for £150,000, a hefty price tag at the time. 

This fall, Christie’s Education, the academic arm of the well-known auction house, will offer a certificate course titled Collecting Contemporary Art at its facility in New York. Divided into seven evening sessions, the course will explore what drives the current trends in the contemporary art market. According to Christie’s, the course is ideal for art enthusiasts or collectors at all levels who are interested in learning more about art from the late 1980s to the present, as well as artistic strategies, collecting practices, the market, and the social and institutional networks that support the art.

The contemporary art market has become increasingly robust in recent years and shows no signs of slowing down. Earlier this month, Christie’s postwar and contemporary art sale netted $745 million, making it the most expensive auction in art market history. Prices for works by contemporary masters such as Barnett Newman, Andy Warhol, Francis Bacon, and Jean-Michel Basquiat continue to climb as there is no shortage of hungry buyers with millions of dollars at their disposal. Christie’s Education seeks to make sense of the mind-bogglingly lucrative market through classes like “Defining Contemporary Art,” “Learning to Look,” and “Global Markets.”

Christie’s Magnificent Jewels auction on 27 May in Hong Kong showed some disappointing results, with only 81% of the 300 lots on offer sold with a 73% sell-through value.

While the combined sales had a pre-auction estimate of over US$100 million, the bids fell short at only $91,851,200, with the top lot, a rare Golconda diamond pendant necklace named The Eye of Golconda, remaining unsold. A 9.38 carat pear-shaped fancy intense pink diamond fared better, selling for $5.96 million (or $636,117 per carats), at the low end of its estimate though.

The final group of paintings, drawings and sculptures bequeathed to museums by Paul Mellon before his death in 1999 have at last begun to arrive. Hidden away for decades, many are rarities that had never been seen by curators.

The group includes more than 200 works — examples by such artists as van Gogh, Degas, Gauguin, Monet and Seurat — that were only recently removed from the walls of the Mellons’ many homes, where they were enjoyed by his widow, Rachel Lambert Mellon, who died in March at 103.

Norman Rockwell's The Rookie has sold for $22.5 million at auction Thursday. The 1957 painting of baseball players in a locker room was sold by Christie's auction house — heady heights for a work that first appeared on a magazine that sold for 15 cents.

While the "hammer price" of the Rockwell painting was $20 million, Christie's says the painting's final price is $22,565,000, reflecting a buyer's premium. We've updated this post to reflect the auction house's final calculation.

Since Swatch Group purchased Harry Winston in January 2013, it hasn’t revealed much about its plans for the luxury retail brand. However, one thing it has openly done is keep with the Harry Winston tradition of flamboyant purchases of statement diamonds and gems.

On Wednesday, Harry Winston purchased the largest known flawless vivid blue diamond in the world for nearly $23.8 million at Christie’s Geneva Magnificent Jewels sale. The nearly $1,800,000 per carat price paid for the 13.22-carat diamond represents a world record for a blue diamond.

A Mark Rothko painting owned by Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) co-founder and billionaire Paul Allen helped boutique auctioneer Phillips sell $132 million worth of art, capping two weeks of marathon sales in New York.

Estimated at $50 million to $60 million, “Untitled (Red, Blue, Orange)” attracted bids yesterday from four staffers competing on behalf of clients. August Uribe, senior director and worldwide co-head of contemporary art at Phillips, placed the winning bid of $50 million, or $56.2 million with fees.