Auction houses love to make us dream by creating stories about the objects on sale and the personalities who owned them. You might say it has become their core marketing strategy. The forthcoming auction of the contents of Robert de Balkany’s private hotel particulier...
Long before Andy Warhol dreamed of being an art-making machine and more or less managed it with his silkscreens on canvas, Antwerp’s Pierre Paul Rubens (1577-1640), a legend in a different art genre, designed his own great machine for pumping out paintings. On 6th and...
Have you heard the one about the former chairman of Sotheby’s Europe who loved electronic music so much that he took part to a video music? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2uYV3gRbl4U Or the one-time chairman of Phillips who agreed to star in a reality TV show for US...
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,...
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...
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...
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...
Renowned historian and curator Michael Peppiatt saw his life change one day in 1963 when, by sheer coincidence, someone advised he meet the painter Francis Bacon. From then on a friendship ensued, with its ups and downs, in collaboration and fascination. ...
Marina Picasso is one of the heirs of the overabundant estate of Pablo Picasso, the person people call “the greatest painter of the 20th century.” On the occasion of Sotheby’s London February 5th sale of 186 works from her grandfather’s estate—mostly drawings...