On 13 Oct, 2010 With
An 1839 Turner masterpiece of a view of Rome has sold for £29.7m in London, breaking the artist’s auction record. Modern Rome – Campo Vaccino sold in five minutes with six bidders battling for the work which has only come up for sale once before, Sotheby’s said. The previous record was the £20.5m paid in 2006 for Venice painting Giudecca, La Donna della Salute and San Giorgio. Modern Rome, which had an estimate of £12m-£18m, was the top seller at the Old Master and British Paintings sale. Other highlights included Dutch artist Jan Lievens’ study of the head and shoulders of an old bearded man wearing a cap (circa 1629), which brought £2.5m against an estimate of £2-3m. TURNER AUCTIONS:…
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On 13 Sep, 2010 With
Sotheby’s is distinguished by a number of world records for auctioned works of art. On 22 May 2002, Norman Rockwell‘s painting of Rosie the Riveter was sold for $4,959,500. Source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sotheby%27s
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On 3 Sep, 2010 With
York Avenue HQ Illegal antiquities In 1997, a Channel 4 Dispatches programme alleged that Sotheby’s had been trading in antiquities with no published provenance, and that the organisation continued to use dealers involved in the smuggling of artifacts. As a result of this exposé, Sotheby’s commissioned their own report into illegal antiquities, and made assurances that only legal items with published providence would be traded in the future. Price fixing scandal In February 2000, A. Alfred Taubman and Diana (Dede) Brooks, the CEO of the company, stepped down amidst a price fixing scandal. The FBI had been investigating auction practices in which it was revealed that collusion involving commission fixing between Christie’s and Sotheby’s was occurring. In October 2000, Brooks…
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