Displaying items by tag: Art Market

Andy Warhol was the top-selling artist at auction in the past year as increased competition for the most-expensive segment of the market drove global art sales higher.

Collectors bought 1,295 works by the deceased artist totaling $653.2 million, ahead of sales for Pablo Picasso and Francis Bacon, according to preliminary figures by New York-based researcher Artnet. Auctions worldwide rose 10 percent to $16 billion.

Art sales have more than doubled from $6.3 billion in 2009, as surging financial markets lifted the fortunes of the world’s richest.

Sotheby’s January 2015 Old Master Week in New York will feature a select group of highly important paintings assembled by noted collector J.E. Safra. The choice offering of 17 paintings presents a wide range of styles and genres of the period including the Dutch Golden Age, as well as 18th century Italian and French. The vast majority of the works have been off the market for at least 20 years and together the group is estimated to bring $22/34 million. The paintings will go on public exhibition, alongside Sotheby’s Old Master Week sales, beginning January 24.

Leading a very strong group of Dutch works to be offered in Sotheby’s January 2015 sales is "Frozen River at Sunset," painted by Aert van der Neer in or shortly after 1660, a period that was a high point for Dutch landscape painting and for the artist himself (est. $4/6 million).

Art Basel’s 13th edition in Miami Beach closed Sunday, December 7, 2014, amidst strong praise from gallerists, private collectors, museum groups and the media. Highlights of the show included the introduction of the new Survey sector, which brought 13 art-historical projects to the fair, including many rare works never before exhibited in an art fair context; and Art Basel's staging with Performa of Ryan McNamara's "MEƎM 4 Miami: A Story Ballet About the Internet" at the Miami Grand Theater. Solid sales were reported across all levels of the market and throughout the run of the show. Featuring 267 leading international galleries from 31 countries, the show – whose Lead Partner is UBS – attracted an attendance of 73,000 over five days. Attendees included representatives of over 160 museum and institution groups from across the world – and a surging number of new private collectors from the Americas, Europe and Asia.

Following a 100 percent reapplication rate for the Galleries sector and with new galleries coming from across the world, the list of exhibitors was the strongest to date in Miami Beach, firmly solidifying the show's position as the leading international art fair of the Americas.

Sotheby’s has set a new record for J.M.W. Turner during its December 3 Old Masters and British Paintings Evening sale in London, selling the artist’s “Rome, from Mount Aventine” for £30.3 million ($47.4 million) against an estimate of £15-20 million. The previous record for the artist of £29.7 million ($45.1 million) was set by Sotheby’s in 2010 with the painting “Modern Rome - Campo Vaccino.”

Turner’s “Rome, from Mount Aventine,” which Sotheby’s describes as “one of the greatest masterpieces of British art left in private hands,” was last seen on the market in 1878 and has been in the same collection for the past 136 years, according to Sotheby’s.

Sotheby’s continues to build aggressively on its strength in the Impressionist and Modern market announcing today Matisse’s "Odalisque au fauteuil noir," estimated at between £9 and 12m, for its London sale of Impressionist and Modern art. Helena Newman, Sotheby’s Co-Head, Impressionist & Modern Art Worldwide, said, “This exquisitely colored painting is one of the finest of the artist’s celebrated ‘Odalisque’ paintings to come to the market.”

An exquisite portrait depicting Princess Nézy-Hamidé Chawkat, the great granddaughter of the last Sultan of Turkey, "Odalisque au fauteuil noir" (dated 1942 and estimated at £9-12m) is one of Henri Matisse’s finest paintings from his famed ‘Odalisque’ series, his depictions of the notorious concubine figure, with which he created one of the most recognizable emblems of eroticism in Modern art.

On October 17, France’s Assemblée Nationale rejected an amendment proposed by the center-leaning UDI party (Union des démocrates et indépendants), which set out to make works of art susceptible to ISF (l’impôt de solidarité sur la fortune, or solidarity tax on wealth). The amendment failed 18 votes against 3.

President of the party who put forward the proposition Philippe Vigier said: “It is a case of supervising the practices of a speculative market and not at all a question of taxing culture or creativity.”

The tenth edition of Master Drawings in New York January 24 – February 1, 2015 promises to be the best ever. More than thirty of the world’s leading dealers are coming to New York City to offer for sale master art works in pencil, pen and ink, chalk and charcoal, as well as oil on paper sketches and watercolors, created by iconic artists working in the 16th to 21st centuries. Each exhibition is hosted by an expert specialist and many works on offer are newly discovered or have not been seen on the market in decades, if at all.

In addition, Margot Gordon and Crispian Riley-Smith, co-founders of Master Drawings in New York, announced that John Marciari, the new head of the Department of Drawings and Prints at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York, will provide the introduction for the 2015 Master Drawings in New York brochure.

The contemporary art market experienced a record-breaking year in 2013/14, smashing through the $2 billion mark for the first time, according to new figures released on Tuesday.

US artists Jean-Michel Basquiat, who died in 1988, Jeff Koons and Christopher Wool remain the market's biggest stars accounting for sales at auction of 339 million euros ($436 million), according to Artprice, a Paris-based organization which keeps the world's biggest database on the contemporary art market.

In the year from July 2013, sales of contemporary art at public auctions reached $2.046 billion dollars, up 40 percent on the previous year, Artprice's annual report said.

The Getty Research Institute has launched an expanded dealer stock book database that provides free online access to almost 24,000 records created from the Knoedler Gallery painting stock books. Books 1 through 6, dating from 1872 to 1920, are available now; stock books 7 through 11 will be added soon.

Knoedler Gallery in New York was a central force in the evolution of an art market in the U.S. This newly enhanced database can be used to reconstruct the itineraries of thousands of paintings that crossed the Atlantic during the Gilded Age—including many that ended up in major American museums.

There was a time when glass was a craft. But in recent years it has become something more: an established art form, and an attractive—and affordable—investment.

"Art glass is a great way to begin collecting art because there is so much available at so many price points," says Carina Villinger, head of 20th century decorative art and design at Christie's.

Since the launch of the Studio Glass movement in the 1960s, glass has slowly crossed the species barrier from craft to fine art. Today, examples of glass art include bright colors and arresting shapes, works that resemble paintings in glass, and objects both strange and familiar encased in glass.