On 26 Dec, 2010 With
A Picasso painting of one of his mistresses today sold for £70.3million ($106.5million) — a world record price for any artwork sold at auction. The 1932 Nude, Green Leaves And Bust, which had a pre-sale estimate of £46 million-£59million, was sold to an undisclosed telephone bidder at a Christie’s impressionist and modern art auction in New York. The sale — equivalent to £21,537 for each square inch of the artwork — surpassed the £65million paid for Giacometti’s L’Homme Qui Marche at Sotheby’s in February. The previous highest price for a Picasso was $104.2 million for Boy With A Pipe (The Young Apprentice) sold at Sotheby’s in New York in 2004. The painting, a large-scale depiction of Pablo Picasso’s mistress Marie-Thérèse…
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On 20 Dec, 2010 With
John Myatt, (born 1945), is a British artist and convicted forger who, with John Drewe, perpetrated what has been described as “the biggest art fraud of the 20th century”. Early life The son of a farmer, Myatt attended art school, and discovered a talent for mimicking other artists’ styles, but at first only painted for amusement and for friends. He worked as a songwriter for a time, and wrote the single “Silly Games”, a UK Top 40 hit for Janet Kay in 1979. He later worked as a teacher in Staffordshire. Painting When his wife left him in 1985, Myatt gave up teaching to spend more time with his children, and attempted to make a living by painting original works in the style of well known artists….
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On 27 Oct, 2010 With
A rare self portrait by Edouard Manet’s has sold for more than £22 million at auction, in a record sale for the artist By Andrew Hough The painting, “Self Portrait with a Palette”, was bought for a record price by New York dealer Franck Giraud, who was bidding at the Sothebys sale, in central London. The Manet was among 51 lots in Sotheby’s sale of Impressionist and modern works at the start of a series of auctions in London over the coming fortnight. Three lots sold for more than £10 million including the 1878 Manet, one of only two self-portraits he painted. It shows the artist dressed as a Parisian dandy, rather than as a working artist. It was created at a…
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On 22 Oct, 2010 With
The most expensive work from classical antiquity ever sold at auction 2007: The most expensive work from classical antiquity ever sold at auction: Roman-era bronze sculpture of Artemis and the Stag. Sold for $28.6 million.
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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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