In the big market for new names that the small contemporary art world spends much of its time oohing and aahing about before quickly forgetting again, there are nonetheless those sincere individuals who often know not what to make of an artist through lack of...
For a very long time they were stowed out of sight in a box under a bed somewhere in England. This is the story of 50 etchings with an estimated value of £1.4 million by one of the most important masters in the history of art, a giant of the Dutch golden age,...
'Basel is the Wimbledon of art. It’s the fair where you find the highest quality in the world and where the most sophisticated collectors make an appearance. Even those further down players (galleries) in the rankings are happy to be included in the credits.’ Chris...
There’s no doubt about it: at the June and December auctions in Paris, where the most beautiful lots of the season are all concentrated, the trophy works tend to be snapped up by foreign buyers. In fact, some of the leader auction houses Sotheby’s, Christie’s and...
It’s a well-known fact, something that heralds a true revolution in the art market: contemporary art is nowadays in the ascendancy while modern and impressionist art, dealing with times gone by, is experiencing softer demand. It’s worth bearing in mind, though, that...
There’s a joke we like to tell in France, one you could imagine inspiring one of his 'Joke painting' by American artist Richard Prince. A man driven to suicide jumps off the top of a skyscraper. On the way down, he says the same thing each floor he passes: ‘So far,...
Every May and November, Sotheby’s and Christie’s modern and contemporary art auctions in New York have become, rightly or wrongly, a shop window for the global art business and a bellwether for the market in the eyes of the general public. In a few lots, everything is...
When it comes to art, there’s a strange microclimate in Brussels. The European capital is home to a surprising number of seasoned collectors with particular interests in those rather challenging art forms people tend to term avant-garde. One of the best illustrations...
‘Each time you talk to your friends on Facebook, each time you buy a book on Amazon, each time you save for your pension fund, you’re dealing with a company practicing tax optimisation. We’re not talking drug trafficking. It frequently turns out that these...
It's a story that has got the entire old master world talking. And it begins like the best art market myths: in 2014 a family in Toulouse, in the south-west of France, while doing work on their house, discovered a canvas in the attic which appeared to be from the...
Picabia, Duchamp, Bellmer... Major names in the history of modern art and, it would seem, completely out of most people’s price range nowadays. In Paris, however, the cradle of Surrealism and Dadaism, you can find highly specialised book and manuscript auctions...
-It’s a massive sale of photographs: 316 prints, the vast majority of them vintage. -It’s a sale devoted to a major photographer, Philippe Halsman (1906-1979), who holds the record for Life Magazine covers (he has 101 to his name), invented ‘jump’ photography (when...