Displaying items by tag: Sotheby's

By way of Instagram and a showing in Hong Kong, Sotheby's unveiled yet another blockbuster consignment for the upcoming fall contemporary season, Andy Warhol's massive Mao, an 82-by-57-inch silkscreen executed in 1972.

The work, which is expected to realize $40 million at Sotheby's evening contemporary sale on November 11, is the earliest iteration of the cycle that marked Warhol's return to painting after a seven-year hiatus following his "Flowers" series.

From December 2-5, 2015 Sotheby’s New York will present the single-owner sale of Property from the Collection of Robert S Pirie, one of the world’s leading book collectors. Over 60 years, Mr. Pirie built the finest collection of 16th and 17th-century English literature in private hands with significant copies of works by Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Marlowe, and John Donne among others. Mr. Pirie was a knowledgeable and dedicated collector whose library is made all the more extraordinary by the particular emphasis he placed on the hardest to find works with distinguished provenance. In addition to his prominence in the world of rare books, Mr. Pirie was a leading financier and widely admired New York Renaissance Man.

Art auctions used to be a gentlemen’s business. Now the gloves are off.

As art sales face their first major test since the August financial market rout, auction houses are jockeying not only for trophy artworks but also for the best positions to highlight them at the November auctions in New York. The result is a shakeup in a schedule that for years was tightly coordinated, with Christie’s and Sotheby’s traditionally alternating who goes first. Even the weekends are no longer off limits; in a surprising move, Phillips, the smallest of the three, switched its main sale to a Sunday.

A painting British artist John Constable kept by his side until his death is to be offered for sale.

The Lock - one of a small group of landscapes known as the Six-Footers - will be put up for sale in December by Sotheby's auction house.

The painting of a bucolic scene on the River Stour in Suffolk is estimated to be worth £8-12m.

Three works by Andrew Wyeth that belonged to Charlton Heston will be offered at a Sotheby's sale in November, the New York auction house is expected to announce on Thursday.

In addition, the company will auction off a rarely seen Francis Bacon painting that once belonged to Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni and is estimated to be worth as much as $18 million.

finely embroidered Buddhist thangka was sold for $1.5 million at Sotheby's, New York on Wednesday. Estimated to sell for between $80,000 and $120,000, the artwork fetched 15 times the expected price.

The 18th century Qing dynasty thangka hung in an Arizona home for decades. The artwork was bought by the collector Wilton D. Cole and his wife in 1971 and passed down to their children, who were reportedly unaware of the artifact's value.

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 will offer the 12.03 carat Blue Moon Diamond, among the largest known fancy vivid blue diamonds at part of its Magnificent Jewels and Noble Jewels in Geneva on November 11.

A blue diamond is created when boron is mixed with carbon during the gem’s formation. Graded Fancy Vivid Blue – the highest possible colour grading for blue diamonds, the cushion brilliant-cut stone has been declared Internally Flawless by the GIA and carried an estimate of $ 35-55 million.

Christie's and Sotheby's jump-started the fall season last week with announcements of respective blockbuster consignments including a $100 million Modigliani nude and the roughly $500 million collection of illustrious former Sotheby's chairman A. Alfred Taubman's estate.

According to the 8-K SEC filing Sotheby's made on September 9, the publicly traded auction house is betting big on the $500 million Taubman collection, having given estate overseer and Taubman's son Robert a financial guarantee "for the collection at approximately that level." The SEC Filing was first flagged by the Art Market Monitor's Marion Maneker in a post this morning.

Ratcheting up one of the oldest rivalries in history, 219-year-old Phillips Auction House is resurrecting its Modern art business and launching a blitz of hiring and powerful partnerships. It will seek to compete head-to-head with age-old rivals Sotheby’s and Christie’s this fall in the high end of the billion-dollar art market.

People close to the matter say that, after downsizing about a decade ago in the wake of some unsuccessful sales, the company—working with just-announced partners eBay, former Brooklyn Museum director Arnold Lehman and executives with ties to the deep-pocketed Arabian collecting world—could be making a play to disrupt the Coca-Cola/Pepsi-like hold on the art auction market that the Big Two have long enjoyed.