On 15 November 2017 a painting was sold at Christie’s in New York for 450,312,500 dollars, the highest amount ever attained at auction, which was one of around twenty known to us by the Renaissance genius Leonardo da Vinci. This result gave rise to various...
Millions of dollars are again going to be raining down. At the end of a week of sales dedicated to the impressive Rockefeller collection (cf. the Report) in which the first night of auctions alone brought in 646 million dollars and record prices for Monet, Matisse,...
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...
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...
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...
Impressionist and modern sales have been moving in a strange direction of late. Adopting marketing strategies that are unusual to say the least, they respond to a market where ‘high quality items are rare and demand is stronger than ever,’ as Thomas Seydoux, the Swiss...
Diego Giacometti (1902-1985), the brother and close collaborator of the illustrious sculptor Alberto Giacometti, has a seat in the pantheon of 20th century decorative arts. Hubert de Givenchy (born 1926), whose creations were made famous by the actor Audrey Hepburn...
When uncertainty reigns, everyone tries to protect themselves, and the art market is no exception. ‘For some time now, there has been a strong trend towards contemporary artists with recognised careers and a place in history. Serious collectors who previously showed...
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,...