Displaying items by tag: Sotheby's

The sale realised £130,376,500 / $204,730,218 / €183,870,150 - the highest total for any auction of Contemporary Art ever held at Sotheby’s London.

“We reached new heights at Sotheby’s tonight with the highest total we’ve ever achieved for Contemporary Art in London. Bidders from across the globe were drawn to Warhol works that ripped up the rule book for 20th-century art; rediscovered Francis Bacon gems; and some of the greatest works by British artists of the last 70 years. Tonight’s achievements affirm the pivotal position of London within the international art market.” -- Alex Branczik, Sotheby’s Head of Contemporary Art, London

Artistic Currency: Warhol’s One Dollar Bill (Silver Certificate)
Andy Warhol’s landmark first ‘dollar’ painting, hand-painted in 1962, sold for £20.9m / $32.8m / €29.4m tonight - the highest price achieved across all auction houses this week (est. £1318m). This marks the fourth consecutive sale season in London that Sotheby’s has achieved the top lot across all auction houses.

The two houses will do almost anything to outmaneuver each other, and the friction between them will likely only increase under new CEOs.

This May, after billionaires had outbid billionaires in New York’s contemporary art auctions, something became immediately clear: Christie’s had just clobbered Sotheby’s with a gavel.

Over four days, Christie’s sales totaled $1.7 billion, its biggest week ever. On one of those evenings, frantic bidding inside its Rockefeller Center salesroom enabled the auction house to sell $706 million of art spanning the 20th century in less than two hours. An anonymous bidder even plunked down $179.4 million for Pablo Picasso’s Les Femmes d’Alger, smashing the record for the most expensive work ever sold at auction. “We’re in a fantasyland,” proclaimed collector Michael Ovitz, the former president of Walt Disney Co., as he left the room...

LONDON — A rare full-length portrait by Gustav Klimt sold for 24.8 million pounds with fees, or about $39 million, at a Sotheby’s auction in London on Wednesday.

Sotheby’s had placed an estimate of £12 million to £18 million (about $19 million to $28 million) on Klimt’s 1902 portrait of Gertrud Loew, the 19-year-old daughter of Dr. Anton Loew, the director of a prominent Viennese private sanatorium that treated fin-de-siècle luminaries such as Mahler, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Klimt himself.

The portrait, which had never previously been offered on the open market, was won by an unknown buyer...

Into first editions and have half a million to spare? You are in luck then: a section of a 15th century edition of the Gutenberg Bible will be auctioned off on June 19 at Sotheby's New York, with a presale estimate between $500,000 and $700,000.

The eight-leaf section, taken from a bible printed in 1455, comprises the entire Book of Esther, preceded by the end of the Book of Judith and the prologue of Jerome to Esther, and followed by the prologue of Jerome to Job.

Sotheby’s announced that Edgar Degas’ "Petite danseuse de quatorze ans," estimated to fetch £10 – 15 million, will feature in the forthcoming Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale in London on June 24, 2015. "Petite danseuse de quatorze ans" is the most ambitious and iconic of Degas’ works and one of only a handful of bronze casts that remain in private hands - the majority are housed in major international museum collections, including Tate, London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Philadelphia Museum of Art and Museé d’Orsay, Paris.

A work from of Francis Bacon’s most famous series of paintings, of seated and often screaming popes, is to go on sale with an estimated value of £25m to £35m. When the canvas last went under the hammer in 2005, “Study for a Pope I” (1961) fetched £10 million — at the time this was a record for the artist. But even if the work goes under the hammer for the lower end of the latest price estimate, it would still equate to a rise in value of 150 percent.

The French government has imposed an export ban on three items which descendants of France's former royal family consigned to auction at Sotheby's Paris, Yahoo News reports.

France's culture minister Fleur Pellerin designated the items as pieces of “national treasure" to stop them from going under the hammer and from leaving the country.

A painting by Gustav Klimt that has been in private hands for over a century will be auctioned at Sotheby’s Impressionist and Modern Art Evening Sale here on June 24. The work, “Portrait of Gertrud Loew,” painted in 1902, has an estimated sale price of 12 million to 18 million pounds (about $18 million to $28 million), and is for sale as a result of a settlement between the Felsovanyi family, the heirs of the painting’s subject, and the Klimt Foundation.

One of the defining images of French impressionism is up for sale, as Sotheby's auctions Edouard Manet's "Le Bar aux Folies-Bergere."

The auction house says the painting will be offered at a June 24 sale in London, with an estimated price of 15 million pounds to 20 million pounds ($23 million to $30.7 million).

Unique ceramics by Pablo Picasso belonging to the artist’s granddaughter, Marina Picasso will go under the hammer at Sotheby’s this summer. One of the most extensive and important groups of the artist’s work in this medium, the collection offers an incomparable insight into Picasso’s work in clay and the extraordinary breadth of his creativity and versatility. The huge appeal of these pieces stems from Picasso’s ingenuity in transforming everyday objects into works of art.”