Displaying items by tag: Sotheby's

A flawless fancy vivid pink diamond sold for a record $17.7 million in Hong Kong late Tuesday, Sotheby's said.

The auction house said the internally flawless 8.41-carat stone had been expected to go under the hammer for up to $15.5 million.

Quek Chin Yeow, deputy chairman of Sotheby's Asia, said the pear-shaped stone had "attracted keen competition before fetching a wonderful price of HK$137.88 million (US$17.77 million) and setting a world auction record for a fancy vivid pink diamond."

 As anticipation of the upcoming fall auction season continues to build, Sotheby’s has announced that it will offer the illustrious Schlumberger Collection during its Evening and Day Sales of Impressionist & Modern Art and Contemporary Art on November 4-5 and November 11-12, respectively. The collection, which brings together over ninety modern and contemporary masterworks from the twentieth century, is expected to fetch over $85 million.

Pierre Schlumberger, an aristocratic French oil-industry tycoon, and his beautiful Portuguese wife, São, are considered two of the most visionary collectors of the twentieth century.

American artist Jeff Koons, who is best known for his reproductions of banal objects, has had a monumental year. In addition to a major installation (which closed last month) at 30 Rockefeller Plaza in New York, Koons is the subject of a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art -- the institution’s final exhibit before moving to its new location in the Meatpacking District. The exhibition has been so popular, that the Whitney will stay open for 36 hours before the landmark retrospective closes on October 19. After its run at the Whitney, the Koons retrospective will head to the Centre Pompidou in Paris, where it will coincide with a display of works at the Musée du Louvre that will include examples of the artist’s “Balloon Rabbit,” “Balloon Swan,” and “Balloon Monkey” sculptures.

Beyond the museum world, the Koons craze is now spilling into New York’s fall auction season.

As auction houses gear up for the major fall sales, news of several blockbuster consignments is starting to trickle out. Following the revelation from Sotheby’s last week that it has secured a rare Vincent van Gogh still life that is expected to sell for between $30–50 million, the house has revealed it will offer two extremely rare and iconic sculptures—by Amedeo Modigliani and Alberto Giacometti—that have never appeared at auction before and will undoubtedly be among the leading lots at the November 4 evening sale of Impressionist and modern art.

Giacometti’s "Chariot" (conceived and cast in 1950) is a unique painted cast depicting a goddess perched  atop a chariot with large wheels.

A bouquet of wildflowers painted by Vincent van Gogh weeks before his death is going on the auction block in New York City. Sotheby's says "Still Life, Vase With Daisies and Poppies" could sell for $30 million to $50 million Nov. 4.

Van Gogh painted it at the home of his physician, Dr. Paul Gachet, in 1890. It's one of the few works he sold during his lifetime.

Sotheby’s has announced that it will be selling Jasper Johns’s "Flag" (1983) during the November 11 Contemporary Art Evening Auction in New York. This particular example of "Flag," which is relatively small at approximately 11 x 17 inches and done in encaustic on silk and collaged onto canvas, carries a price estimate of  $15 million to $20 million. (or about $1 million a square inch.) Before the sale, it will go on something of a grand tour, being showcased to collectors in Los Angeles, Hong Kong and London.

In 2010, Christie’s sold a larger version of a Johns flags, nearly 17 x 26 inches, which was also painted much early, circa 1960-1966, for a record price of $28.6 million.

Sotheby’s auction house is making a big push for its latest target -- the new wealthy along the West Coast of the U.S. -- by showing off more than $200 million of art.

Armed with highlights from its upcoming New York sales including canvases by Mark Rothko and Jasper Johns along with Old Master painting and jewelry, Sotheby’s starting this month will woo the rich from San Diego to Seattle with exhibitions, wine tastings and dinners in private homes.

A pair of Chinese porcelain vases fetched $1.2 million; a 7-inch-tall celadon vase sold for $2.3 million and a bronze Buddha statue went for $485,000 -- all blowing past their presale estimates many times over.

So went the buying spree during Asia Week in New York this week as Chinese dealers and collectors packed the salesrooms and snapped up pieces of their cultural heritage. Auctions at Sotheby’s, Christie’s, Bonhams and Doyle New York are expected to tally $95 million.

Few people have ever visited Oak Spring Farms, the grand home here of Rachel Lambert Mellon, better known as Bunny. If they had, they would have seen a Pissarro, unframed like a flea market find, above the living room fireplace. Upstairs, a still life by van Gogh hung above her bathtub. Antique porcelains — cabbages, asparagus, artichokes — were artfully arranged on practically every surface.

Mrs. Mellon was the matriarch of an American dynasty whose fortune and art holdings rivaled that of the Fricks, Carnegies and Morgans. But perhaps most notably, she was a passionate collector of a bygone era. She didn’t pay attention to what was in fashion; she didn’t think about future financial returns.

It’s a flip-flop over an art flip. In a surprising reversal, a Dallas judge has dismissed collector Marguerite Hoffman’s lawsuit for breach of contract against finance mogul David Martinez and defunct New York gallery L&M Arts, in a case that involves a spectacular flip of a multi-million dollar Mark Rothko.

Back in 2007, Martinez paid Hoffman $19 million for the painting, then turned around just three years later and sold it at Sotheby’s for a headline-grabbing $31.4 million (in the interim, court papers say, it was kept out of sight in storage).