11 April 2015
Lucian Freud’s most famous and iconic subject will be offered as the highlight of Christie’s Post-War and Contemporary sale on May 13. Benefits Supervisor Resting is regarded as Freud’s ultimate tour de force, a life-size masterwork in the grand historical tradition of the female nude, painted obsessively with intense scrutiny and abiding truth. This bold and extraordinary example of […]
2 April 2015
Bonhams New York has reported the sale of all 740 lots of the Lauren Bacall Collection, totaling £2.45m ($3.64m). Lauren Bacall was 19 when she made her screen debut in To Have and Have Not (1944) opposite Humphrey Bogart. They married soon after in 1945 and had a son and a daughter, Stephen and Leslie. Although Bogart passed away in […]
27 March 2015
Sotheby’s Made in Britain sale, a dedicated auction celebrating the diversity of British art from 1900 to today has created ten new records for British Artists. . Over 30,000 people attended the viewing with strong prices achieved in both the day and evening sale sessions for works by some of the leading names of post-war British Art. The sale […]
26 March 2015
Christie’s will be offering Pablo Picasso’s Les femmes d’Alger (Version “O”) as the star lot in their New York Impressionist and Modern sale this Spring. The painting is the culmination of a herculean project which Picasso started after Matisse’s death, in homage to his lost friend and competitor, and which over a period of 2 months and after […]
22 March 2015
A good fair with strong sales is the word for TEFAF 2015 as it proves to show growth in many different areas. Contemporary and Modern art has positively taken hold at the fair this year, with a growing emphasis on this sector of the market. Many London art dealers were prominent at the fair displaying well presented stands. Buyers who have […]
21 March 2015
A sale of Important Ceramics by Pablo Picasso (Sotheby’s 18 March) has scuppered the master’s original intentions behind creating multiples. Picasso’s original dream that anyone could own one of his works, was further undermined, at Sotheby’s London, this week, as the results almost tripled their pre-sale low estimates to bring £1,726,625 ($2,548,153), with a 95% […]
19 March 2015
Cui Ruzhuo, the Beijing-born ink painter has toppled last year’s most expensive artist, oil painter Fan Zeng, from the top of the Hurun Art List 2015. His sales at auction reached $77 million, or £51 million in 2014, with ‘Landscape in Snow’ (2006) fetching $23.7 million, or £15.8 million at a Poly Auction sale in […]
19 March 2015
Modern art masterpieces from The Samuel Goldwyn family Collection will go under the hammer at Sotheby’s, in a series of auctions beginning in May 2015. The Goldwyn’s is legendary within the film industry, many will discover in these sales that their creative vision also extended to collecting fine art. Samuel Goldwyn Sr. assembled a core […]
16 March 2015
After a rocky year with investors, a near coup d’état, and lower than expected profits Sotheby’s has announced Tad Smith as the new President and Chief Executive Officer, effective March 31, 2015. He succeeds William F. Ruprecht who has served as CEO since 2000. Smith will also join the Sotheby’s Board of Directors Smith, 49, […]
16 March 2015
From Rembrandt to Warhol, is a veritable roll call of leading artists taking the stage at Sotheby’s London sale of Prints & Multiples on 17 March 2015, with estimates ranging from £3,000 upwards to £200,000. The auction opens with a particularly strong selection of Old Master prints, led by Rembrandt’s The Three Crosses, considered one […]
14 March 2015
The 2015 TEFAF art market report has been released reporting a staggering €51 Billion £36b world wide market. Growth especially in the online art market added €3.3 billion (£2.3b) 6% to the total. The middle market (priced between £1000-£30,000) accounted for much of online selling. Post-War and Contemporary art accounted for almost half of total […]
9 March 2015
Christie’s is auctioning Mark Rothko’s masterpiece No. 36 (Black Stripe), 1958, from the collection of the Museum Frieder Burda in Baden-Baden – one of Europe’s most important and prestigious private museums for Classical Modernism and Contemporary art based in Germany. With Rothko’s signature concordance of three shimmering rectangles of directly contrasting color asserting themselves against […]
9 March 2015
New York’s oldest established art fair for modern and contemporary works returned to Piers 92 & 94 from March 5-8 in what has been hailed as buoyant sales across the board. Artworks by over 1,500 artists from 199 galleries across the United States, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. Further to record exhibitor applications, a […]
3 March 2015
Art Basel has announced details of its 46th edition in Basel, Switzerland, taking place June 18 to June 21, 2015. This year, 283 leading international galleries will present works ranging from the Modern period of the early 20th century to the most contemporary artists of today. The Basel show, whose Lead Partner is UBS, will […]
3 March 2015
The best known art fairs such as Art Basel and FIAC are slipping in popularity. Skate’s Art Market Research have published statistics for 2014 which showed art fair attendance was down 7.2% compared to 2013. They reported a total of 1,032,729 people attended the world’s top 20 art fairs in 2014. The top fair was […]
2 March 2015
Sotheby’s have officially released their 2014 figures which show a (20%) adjusted Operating Income profit over the prior year, reflecting the continued strength of the global art market along with the benefit of management’s cost reduction initiatives. With a turnover of $6.1b/£3.9 billion and after-tax basis, adjusted Net Income* is $142.4 million, an $11.6 million […]
16 February 2015
The newly relaunched Phillips Auctioneers have sold Ai Weiwei’s Circle of Animals / Zodiac Heads, 2010 for £2.8m ($4.3m) at the Contemporary Art Evening Sale which took place on Thursday, 12 February. The twelve gold-plated sculptures portraying the signs of the ancient Chinese zodiac had a pre-sale estimate of £2,000,000 – £3,000,000. “The Zodiac Heads […]
15 February 2015
The Post-War & Contemporary Art evening sale at Christie’s London realised a total of £117,142,500 / $178,408,028 / €157,556,663 selling 95% by value with outstanding sell-through rates. The top price of the evening was paid for Cy Twombly’s Untitled (New York City), which sold for £19,682,500 / $29,976,448/ €26,472,96 (estimate in the region of £16million). […]
12 February 2015
Last evening’s Sotheby’s sale of Contemporary Art in Europe was led by Gerhard Richter’s Abstraktes Bild which established a new record for the artist, selling for £30.4 million / $46.3 million / €41 million (with an estimate of £14 to 20 million), a new benchmark for any European living artist. The painting was created in […]
5 February 2015
Christie’s has held the first ever Surrealism sale to break the $100 million mark. Registered bidders came from 34 countries across 5 continents for the ‘Evening Sales of Impressionist and Modern Art and The Art of the Surreal’ that took place at Christie’s London on 4 February. It realised a combined total of £147,031,000/$222,751,965/€194,080,920, selling […]
4 February 2015
Three works which are probably Andy Warhol’s most iconic portraits from the 1980s will go to auction at Bonhams in London on February 12 at the Post-War & Contemporary Art sale. Each work by the Factory artist depicts a person that was a close friend of Warhol, as well as an important figure of the […]
3 February 2015
Sotheby’s Auctioneers has set a new record for the highest total for a London auction. Helena Newman, Sotheby’s Co-Head, Impressionist & Modern Art Worldwide, said: “Building on the momentum of Sotheby’s record Impressionist & Modern art sales last year, we’re delighted to launch the first sale season of 2015 with a new high for art […]
3 February 2015
UK Culture Minister, Ed Vaizey, has placed a temporary export ban on a 17th century painting by Claude Lorrain, which will provide a last chance to keep the work of art in the UK. The painting is considered to be one of the finest examples of the artist’s seaport and harbour scenes, the work is […]
1 February 2015
Brand new figures published by the Department for Culture, Media & Sport have revealed that the UK’s Creative Industries are now worth £76.9 billlion per year to the UK economy. This is a growth of almost ten per cent on 2013 and three times that of wider UK economy. The figures accounted for 1.7 million […]
30 January 2015
We reported on the 9 January that a painting by John Constable misattributed and sold for a fraction of its actual value at Christie’s was up for sale again at Sotheby’s New York. Now it has been confirmed that the picture, bought for £3,500 just 18 months ago has sold at auction in New York […]
30 January 2015
Steve Lazarides, the former agent of the notorious Bristol street artist Banksy has auctioned off a collection his private collection of 30 Banksy prints and two sculptures. The auction was held as part of Founded 1793, the contemporary art auction at Bonhams New Bond Street which took place on 28 January 2015. Bonhams London auctioned […]
28 January 2015
Phillips London’s Contemporary Art Evening sale on February 12 will host Ai Weiwei’s Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads (2010). The group of gold-plated bronze sculptures, number seven of an edition of eight, has a presale estimate of £2 million to £3 million. The Chinese artist’s sculptures are based on the zodiac clock-fountain that once graced the […]
28 January 2015
Sotheby’s Old Masters Sale on 28/29 January has an overall estimate of $73.9 to 106 million, or £48.6 million to £69.7 million for five Old Master sales, represents just a fraction of the hundreds of millions the auction house reaps in a typical autumn or spring New York season for Impressionist and contemporary art. “It’s […]
25 January 2015
The 27th London Art Fair has closed its doors for the 2015 edition with only one way to sum up the event, ‘strong attendance and strong sales’. The fair is always the first major London fair, which in turn acts as a good barometer for the health of the UK art market in general. The […]
24 January 2015
Christie’s will offer another outstanding week of auctions in February led by Gerhard Richter’s Vierwaldstätter See (Lake Lucerne), 1969, a sublime photo-painting of the famous Swiss Lake, held in the same private collection since 1973, which is presented during the Evening Auction in London on 11 February. Following the world record price of $69.6million achieved […]
23 January 2015
Christie’s has announced it is selling a particularly pivotal, not to mention large installation by one-time YBA tracey Emin called ‘Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made’. The work is estimated to go under the hammer at £600,000 to £800,000. The work consists of 12 big acrylic-on-canvas paintings, seven body paintings and a grand […]