Displaying items by tag: Christie's

Christie's auction house has announced it will offer a 1955 masterpiece by Pablo Picasso for an estimated $140 million.

"Women of Algiers (Version O)" will hit the auction block on May 11.

The vibrantly colorful work features a scantily attired female amid smaller nudes. It is part of a 15-work series Picasso created between 1954 and 1955.

Phillips will sell a $35-million contemporary art collection at its New York auction house this May, featuring works by artists such as Alighiero Boetti, John Chamberlain, Brice Marden, Giuseppe Penone, Ed Ruscha, and Robert Ryman. The consignment represents a coup for the house and a sign of the clout and art world connections of new chairman and CEO Edward Dolman. The longtime Christie's CEO took over the lead role at Phillips this past summer. The house has salesrooms in New York and London and plans to expand to Hong Kong.

Though Phillips typically holds much smaller contemporary art sales than Sotheby's and Christie's, it has nonetheless carved out a niche and become well known for selling art by younger artists like Alex Israel, Oscar Murillo, and Sterling Ruby.

On March 17, Christie’s hosted its first-ever evening sale dedicated to Asian art in New York. The occasion was the first offering from the prized Robert Hatfield Ellsworth Collection, regarded as the most prestigious — not to mention largest — private collection of Asian art to hit the auction block. Thanks to the freshness of the material and the pedigreed provenance, the house had no trouble securing buyers for all 57 lots, and with a whopping $61,107,500, total, the results demonstrated strength across all areas of the market for Indian, Himalayan, Southeast Asian, Chinese, and Japanese art.

The sale began promptly at 6 p.m., with fierce participation from telephone bidders and individuals in the room for a superb gilt-bronze figure of a seated bear from China’s Western Han Dynasty (206 BC).

The art collection of the late John Whitehead, former chairman of Goldman Sachs, is being offered as the cornerstone in Christie's Impressionist and Modern Art sale this May in New York.

The 90 piece estate, with rare works by Claude Monet, Vincent Van Gogh, Amedeo Modigliani, and Pierre Bonnard, is expected to achieve over $40 million in sales.

Whitehead served in the U.S. Navy during World War II, where he commanded a landing craft at Omaha Beach, in the D-Day invasion of Normandy.

Of all the billionaires that come and go on the Forbes China Rich List, Liu Yiqian is certainly the one with the biggest appetite for art. Liu, who ranked No. 220 with a net worth of $ 1 billion, yesterday bought a 600-year-old imperial embroidered Tibetan tapestry at a Christie’s auction for $ 348 million Hong Kong dollars ($45 million), setting a record for any Chinese works of art sold by an international auction house.

For the art-savvy Liu, the magnificent piece is too important to miss. The silk tapestry, known as a thangka, is more than three meters tall and two meters wide.

Mark Rothko once said that his formula for a good painting included a dollop of hope – “10 percent to make the tragic concept more endurable.” When bidders gather on May 13 at Christie’s to do battle for the next big Rothko to come to auction – a blazing red and black work, “No. 36 (Black Stripe),” painted in 1958, a banner year for the artist – they will have to bring a lot more than hope.

The painting, being sold by the German collector Frieder Burda, who has given it pride of place in his museum in Baden-Baden for several years, is estimated to sell for $30 million to $50 million. But prime Rothkos have become so rare and sought-after that the competition is likely to be fierce. Rothko’s auction record was set at Christie’s in 2012, when “Orange, Red, Yellow,” another of his trademark horizontal color-slab paintings, from 1961, sold for almost $87 million.

Elizabeth Taylor jewels are back in the news.

Christie's 2011 sale of the collection of Elizabeth Taylor was a landmark event celebrating the iconic Holllywood star's life with back-to-back auctions of her art, fashion, and jewels. The evening jewels sale alone achieved $115.9 million, the most valuable jewelry auction in history and seven new world auction records were established.

But now it seems that some of those "record" results have become a royal embarrassment.

Phillips is used to coming in at the tail end of these auction series, with a smaller, shorter sale than Sotheby's or Christie's, and with a more contemporary, less postwar emphasis. The auctioneer's problem is to secure good examples by artists at reasonable estimates because, in most cases, the house is second or third port of call for sellers. Now in its plush, central location on London's Mayfair, with Sotheby's and the new, large Gagosian gallery-to-be just around the corner, it is also upgrading the staff. With former Christie's chief executive Ed Dolman at the helm, the latest signing is Matt Carey-Williams, a young man with a veteran's experience from Sotheby's, Gagosian, and White Cube, as deputy chairman, Europe and Asia, who was very much part of the action this evening.

Christie's London staged a really solid sale this evening that realized £117 million ($178 million) against a presale estimate of £93–132 million and achieved all but five of 62 lots selling. These figures hide what was actually a fairly see-saw event, as 25 lots went for hammer prices above their estimate, three of them for record prices. Twenty lots struggled, selling for hammer prices on or below the low estimates, including five of the top 10 lots. (Estimates do not include buyer's premium, whereas sale prices given here do.) So, while the sale was the third highest for Christie's contemporary in London (the previous high was £133 million in June 2012), it wasn't entirely smooth sailing.