It will have escaped no one, thanks to the huge scale of the media shockwaves across the globe, that on 15 November Leonardo da Vinci’s “Salvator Mundi” was sold at auction for a sum never before officially attained for an artwork: 450.3 million dollars. Let’s not...
Jacques Grange is the french superstar of interior design. He has worked for the joint heir to the cosmetics empire and prolific art collector Ronald Lauder, the businessman Leon Black who is just as famous in New York for his elitist taste in art (he is the owner of...
To witness the spectacle of certain works by Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) is to experience a phenomenon verging on the mystical. Excluding the Mona Lisa, whose true nature is barely discernible behind the thick glass and throng of tourists, many great drawings or...
On 13 November, Christie’s is set to auction an artwork that perfectly encapsulates the fascination wielded by René Magritte (1898-1967) over the twentieth century. Made in 1949, it is called “L’empire des lumières” (“The Dominion of Light”). In the painting, which is...
How do you define a good fair? A commercial event dedicated to art, which offers such diversity and quality in a single setting (hopefully a pleasant one) that it allows the collector to avoid having to do the rounds of the other next fairs. For its 2017 edition, the...
In 2016, according to the Artprice database, Great Britain was in third place in the contemporary art market behind the United States and China. But Artprice bases these analyses solely on auction results. In fact, the London art market’s major annual event is the...
There once was a curious character, a guru of sorts by the name of Joséphin Péladan, who succeeded in assembling around him in the Paris of the late 1880s an inspired and visionary coterie composed of painters, musicians and writers. While listening to Wagner and...
Old habits die hard in the art market. Tradition dictates that the beginning of the month of September in Paris is a time when antique dealers and auction houses put on special events seeking to display their most beautiful wares. They wish to profit from the...
On 14 September an exhibition is due to open at the Marmottan Museum in Paris dedicated to the private collection of one of the greatest modern masters, Claude Monet. Featuring works by Renoir, Manet and Cézanne that belonged to the Giverny master, the collection was...
In Brazil a country already wracked by corruption, economic crisis, an acute political crisis and violence, Rio de Janeiro’s police haven't been paid for two months, its university professors for four, live venues are organising events where audiences have to bring...
I’m no different to any other journalist covering the art market. I love writing pieces filled with exclamation marks that detail how an artist who was worth 3,000 has seen one of his works go for 300,000 less than a year later, is now represented by a major gallery...
While History shows as a whole, and the Renaissance in particular, that posterity has a predilection for works by artists afflicted by madness, the art market is far more rational agent. Artworks that are too large, too complicated, too noisy, in other words too...