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Displaying items by tag: Sotheby's
An artist's work is more valuable if they have a short life, a torrid romantic affair or go mad, a leading art expert has said. He suggests it would "not be a bad thing" commercially if certain painters were to die young.
Philip Hook, a senior director at Sotheby's and former Antiques Roadshow expert, said a short life made the price of a piece of art rise, avoiding the tricky "late period" of older artists.
Saying "no-one would want" British artist David Hockney to have died young, he conceded it is likely that it would have made his work more valuable.
“Rockwell’s greatest sin as an artist is simple: His is an art of unending cliché.”
In that Washington Post criticism of a 2010 exhibition of Norman Rockwell paintings at the Smithsonian, Blake Gopnik joined a long line of prominent critics attacking Rockwell, the American artist and illustrator who depicted life in mid-20th-century America and died in 1978.
“Norman Rockwell was demonized by a generation of critics who not only saw him as an enemy of modern art, but of all art,” said Deborah Solomon, whose biography of Rockwell, “American Mirror,” was published last year. “He was seen as a lowly calendar artist whose work was unrelated to the lofty ambitions of art,” she said, or, as she put it in her book, “a cornball and a square.” The critical dismissal “was obviously a source of great pain throughout his life,” Ms. Solomon, a frequent contributor to The New York Times, added.
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.
'They’re everywhere,’ William Herbert, the 18th Earl of Pembroke, says as he strides the 60 feet of his living room in Wilton House, near Salisbury, searching for Cecil Beatons. The faded black-and-white photograph he retrieves from behind the family snaps is of a group of twentysomethings picnicking on the Wiltshire Downs in 1931. It is one of several thousand photographs taken by Beaton during the halcyon period in his life when he lived nearby at Ashcombe, then later at Reddish. ‘We played; we laughed a lot; we fell in love… time stood still and care was a stranger,’ he wrote in his diary in the 1940s.
Cecil Beaton was an almost permanent fixture at Wilton during the 1920s and 30s heyday of the Bright Young Things, and for a long time afterwards. He enjoyed a remarkable friendship with the Pembroke family and a great love affair with the house that he described as ‘at every time of year, in all weathers, unfailing in its beauty’.
Today’s auction of American Art at Sotheby’s New York achieved $45,869,625 (est. $33.2/49.7 million)* – among the highest totals for an American Art sale in the last five years.
- Today’s sell-through rate of 80.7% by lot marks the 5th consecutive American Art auction at Sotheby’s with a strong sell-through rate over 80%.
- Ten lots brought prices over $1 million, with more than half of all sold lots achieving prices above their high estimates – including eight of the auction’s top ten works.
- Ten works by Norman Rockwell totaled $20 million, meeting their combined pre-sale high estimate.
- Led by After the Prom, which sold for $9,1,250,000 – the 4th highest price at auction for the artist (est. $8/12 million). The work was last acquired at Sotheby’s New York in 1995 for $880,000.
Miami pastor was sentenced Monday to six months in jail for peddling bogus examples of some of British artist Damien Hirst's signature paintings.
Kevin Sutherland had faced a possible seven years in prison in the attempted grand larceny case, which accused him of knowingly trying to sell five fake Hirsts for $185,000 to an undercover detective. Sutherland, who plans to appeal, said he was just an art-world tyro who got confusing signals about the pieces' authenticity.
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.
On Wednesday, May 14, Sotheby’s Contemporary Art Evening Sale in New York garnered $364 million, falling well within the auction’s pre-sale estimate of $337 million to $474 million. Of the 79 lots offered, 12 failed to find buyers. While the auction fell short of Christie’s monumental $475 million sale, which took place the evening before, new records were set for twelve artists at Sotheby’s, including Julian Schnabel, Wade Guyton, Rosemarie Trockel, Dan Flavin, Matthew Barney, and Keith Haring.
The top lot of the night was Andy Warhol’s “Six Self-Portraits,” which had resided in a private collection since its creation in 1986. The portraits, which are among the last works created by the pioneering Pop artist, sold for $30.1 million (estimate: $25 million to $35 million). The Warhol works were trailed by Gerhard Richter’s oil-on-canvas painting “Blaud” (1988), which sold to a telephone bidder for $28.7 million (estimate: $25 million to $35 million) and Jeff Koons’ mirror polished stainless steel sculpture with transparent color coating titled “Popeye” (1988), which fetched $28.2 million (estimate on request). The 6 ½-foot tall sculpture was purchased by billionaire casino tycoon and art collector Steve Wynn, who plans to display the work in his Las Vegas casino.
To the uneducated eye, it may look like little more than a blank canvas with a few inches of primary colour, but this painting could soon become the most expensive Mondrian ever sold.
The work, by Piet Mondrian, is said to “epitomise” the artists’ work, and has never before been seen at auction.
Kept out of the public gaze for the last 50 years, after being owned by a private collector, it will now be sold at Sotheby’s for an estimate of up to £18 million.
It is expected to set a new world record for the most expensive work by Mondrian, beating the price of 21,569,000 EUR (£17.6m) set in 2009.
On Tuesday, May 13, Christie’s Post-War and Contemporary Art evening sale in New York achieved a jaw-dropping $745 million -- the highest total for a single auction in art history. The sale exceeded the auction house’s results in November of $691.6 million as well as last May’s total of $495 million for postwar and contemporary artworks.
The auction, which carried a pre-sale estimate of approximately $500 million, was brimming with top-notch material. Out of the 72 lots offered, only four failed to find buyers. New auction records were set for a spate of high-selling artists, including Alexander Calder, Joseph Cornell, Barnett Newman, and Frank Stella.
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