Call it the latest symptom of Marie-Thérèse fever!
Last week I wrote about the Picasso market, specifically with regard to the increased interest in works featuring his lover Marie-Thérèse Walter. Yesterday Christie’s London held the auction referenced in that piece (the Impressionist and Modern Sale) and the star Marie-Thérèse, Jeune fille endormie, Read More
The morning after Christie’s held its $301 million Wednesday-evening sale of Post-war and Contemporary art, the apex of last week’s marquee auction season, you might have expected auctioneers, dealers and collectors to wake up with a queasy combination of winner’s elation and buyer’s remorse. The Christie’s sale was the third headline event in a five-day Read More
Last November, Andy Warhol’s 1962 painting “Men in Her Life” sold for over $60 million at Phillips de Pury & Co. It went for well over its high estimate, and became the second most expensive Warhol painting ever to sell at public auction. Because both the buyer and the under bidder were on the phone, Read More
Auctions are nothing if not ruthless. Last week, Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Phillips held multimillion-dollar spring photography sales of a combined 644 images. The results offered clues, as the art market continues to thaw from the 2008 recession, as to which contemporary photographer’s stocks have risen, whose have fallen and whose are holding steady post-crash. In Read More
Art auctions are, supposedly, exciting. Nobody told the two dozen or so buyers gathered for the Christie’s sale of contemporary art last week. As a photo of a small Sol LeWitt sculpture came on the screen, a man in the back muttered into his cell phone, “I don’t know, do you want it?”
He spoke Read More
