Displaying items by tag: Art Market

One of only a handful of blue period Picassos still in private hands will come to the market with a never publicly seen secret on the reverse of its canvas.

Picasso’s La Gommeuse, an erotically charged 1901 painting of a cabaret performer, is remarkable in its own right and will create waves at the top end of the global art auction market.

Margaret Tao was named Executive Director of Asia Week New York, it was announced by Lark Mason, Chairman of Asia Week New York 2016.

"We are delighted that Margaret is our new Executive Director of Asia Week New York," said Mason.  "Her extensive knowledge of the Asian art market will certainly enhance our visibility and broaden our reach to new collectors." According to Mason, Noémie Bonnet, who previously held the position, is stepping down in order to pursue various projects, but will continue working with the association as its Technology Consultant.

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.

Though the art market continues to post huge gains, six-month figures released by Christie’s today show at $4.5 billion a flat line and close to virtual tie for what the market leader firm achieved for the same period in 2014. That jumbo figure includes both auction and private sales, the latter contributing $515 million to the overall tally, substantially down from $828.2 million achieved for the same period in 2014.

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...

Part of the “Exhibition on Screen” series, the film “The Impressionists and the Man Who Made Them,” directed and produced by Phil Grabsky, is a behind-the-scenes look at the sole supporter of the Impressionist group during the turn of the 19th century: the Parisian art dealer and connoisseur Paul Durand-Ruel. Produced in conjunction with the traveling show “Inventing Impressionism” — which has already been on view at the Musée d’Orsay and London’s National Gallery, and will open at the Philadelphia Museum of Art on June 18 — the film provides viewers with the opportunity to learn about Durand-Ruel’s career and his role in establishing the pillars of the modern art market.

The almighty dollar is the lingua franca of the international art market. But the dollar was also a favorite subject of Andy Warhol and other notable contemporary artists. An upcoming sale from a private collection will seek to wed art and commerce on the glittery altar of the greenback.

A collection of 21 pieces of contemporary art, all depicting the U.S. dollar in some way, is expected to fetch as much as $93 million when it heads to a Sotheby's auction in London on July 1.

The center of the European market for photography has traditionally been Paris, thanks in part to longstanding support from the city’s institutions and, more recently, the dominance of Paris Photo as the leading photography fair this side of the Atlantic.

Now, Photo London, a new fair launched by the cultural consultancy Candlestar with support from the Luma Foundation, is aiming to fill this gap in the capital’s art market, with around 60 international and UK-based galleries, at Somerset House (21-24 May), wh ere the word “photography” was first coined by John Herschel in 1839.

Christie’s Evening Sale of Impressionist and Modern Art realized $202,608,000 (£128,721,728/ €178,022,150) with sell-through rates of 93% by lot and 99% by value. Bidders from 34 countries competed in the room and on the phone for works by Impressionist and Modern masters, including Piet Mondrian, Chaïm Soutine, Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani and Fernand Léger. Bidding on Modern works was particularly active, a testament to the energy brought to the market by crossover collectors and the success of Christie’s curated week of sales spanning both Impressionist & Modern and Post-War and Contemporary categories.

A French art dealer has been taken into custody after Picasso's step-daughter accused him of stealing some of the artist's works, a judicial source said Wednesday.

Catherine Hutin-Blay, the daughter of Pablo Picasso's second wife Jacqueline Roque, filed a complaint against art dealer Olivier Thomas in March after noticing some of her paintings were on the market, the source said, confirming a report in British daily "The Telegraph."