Displaying items by tag: collector

Napoleon Bonaparte’s trademark bicorne hat sold at auction near Paris on Sunday for roughly $2.4 million, according to news reports.

A South Korean collector, whose name was not released, paid nearly five times more than the minimum price set for the two-cornered, black felt hat that was apparently worn by the French emperor during the Battle of Marengo in 1800, the BBC reported.

Jean-Pierre Osenat of the Osenat auction house in Fontainebleau, France said the hat, now weathered from its age, is part of a collection belonging to the Prince of Monaco, whose family is distantly related to Napoleon.

The expansive collection of Russia's Hermitage Museum just got a little bit bigger: Helen Drutt English, the pioneering collector and dealer of American modern and contemporary craft, known in the art world as Helen Drutt, has donated to the Hermitage a collection of 74 works, including ceramics, furniture and jewelry, worth approximately $2 million, reports the "Moscow Times."

The gift coincides with the St. Petersburg institution's 250th anniversary, and is intended to help foster the relationship between Russia and the US.

A Chinese movie tycoon dished out $61.8 million for a Vincent van Gogh painting at a Sotheby's New York auction this week, the highest auction price for a painting by the artist in over 15 years.

The 1890 "Still Life, Vase with Daisies, and Poppies," sold to Wang Zhongjun, one of China's richest men, fetched far more than the $30 million to $50 million estimate, and is said to be the highest price paid for Western art by a Chinese collector.

She was married to Humphrey Bogart. Shot films with the likes of John Wayne and Paul Newman. And over her long career racked up a pair of Tony Awards and an honorary Oscar. But if there was one figure who made screen legend Lauren Bacall weak in the knees it was British sculptor Henry Moore. 

Bacall, who passed away in August, was a longtime art collector, who amassed hundreds of artworks. Her tastes were broad and wide-ranging and her collection included African art and Pablo Picasso. But the actress had special affinity for works by Moore, whom she began collecting in the 1950s and first met in person in the mid-1970s.

The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles has elected four new members to its board of trustees, the latest sign of growing confidence in the museum under new director Philippe Vergne.

Prominent L.A. artist Mark Bradford is among the additions, who also include legislative and public policy strategist Heather Podesta, entrepreneur and art collector Cathy Vedovi and banking executive and philanthropist Christopher Walker.

The additions announced Wednesday raise the number of board members to 50, which the museum said nearly restores the board to its largest size in the last decade.

A Renaissance silver-gilt and enamel salt cellar, bequeathed by collector Michael Wellby to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, has been identified as Nazi loot. It will thus be returned to the descendants of its pre-WWII owner.

The intricate piece is one of the 500 silverware items—believed to be worth in excess of £10 million—donated to the museum in 2012 by Wellby, a former friend of Professor Timothy Wilson, the museum's Keeper of Western Art.

In the spring of 2010, a Queens foundry owner offered to sell a bronze sculpture of a U.S. flag to an art collector. The creator, the foundry owner said, was American contemporary artist Jasper Johns, and the price was around $10 million.

On Thursday, the foundry owner, Brian Ramnarine, was sentenced to 30 months in prison in federal court in Manhattan after pleading guilty in January to three counts of wire fraud, including one for making an unauthorized copy of the sculpture, named “Flag,” and creating false documents purporting that it was a rare gift from Mr. Johns.

Gary Nader has always felt Miami’s art and culture network was missing something: a museum dedicated to showcasing Latin American media. So he decided to create his own.

Nader, a local art collector with a gallery in Wynwood, revealed plans this week to build a Latin American Art Museum at a still-to-be-determined location in downtown Miami. The museum, he said, will feature about 600 paintings, drawings and sculptures from his personal collection. “The influence of Latin America in the U.S. is extremely prominent,” he said. “We want to tell the story."

Christie’s sold 46.9 million pounds ($75.3 million) of postwar and contemporary art at the start of Frieze week in London, as a Gerhard Richter estimated at as much as 10 million pounds failed to find a buyer at the auction.

Richter’s “Netz,” a red, yellow and green abstract painting, was sold after the auction to a private U.S. collector for 5.5 million pounds, Francis Outred, head of postwar and contemporary art, Europe, said at a news conference after last night’s sale.

The 44 works, from the Essl Collection of contemporary art in Austria, produced a total that fell within the auction house’s presale estimated range of 40 million to 56.8 million pounds.

The Swiss art gallery named as the sole heir of reclusive German art collector Cornelius Gurlitt is to accept his bequest of masterpieces which include works looted by the Nazis from Jews, a Swiss paper reported on Sunday.

Gurlitt, who died in May aged 81, had secretly stored hundreds of works by the likes of Chagall and Picasso at his Munich apartment and a house in nearby Salzburg, Austria.

The collection, worth an estimated 1 billion euros (0.78 billion pounds), contains an as yet undetermined number of works taken by the Nazis from their Jewish owners during World War Two.