Markets around the world are looking to China to buoy their financial prospects. So are art auction houses.

After a dismal year, Sotheby’s and Christie’s International PLC are set to begin a major round of art auctions in London on Tuesday, and experts say Chinese collectors may emerge as the latest power players to bid up Western icons they once ignored, from Pablo Picasso to Pierre-Auguste Renoir.

Paul Cézanne’s “Pichet et Fruits Sur Une Table”. Estimate – $16.1 million – $24.2 million

Auction houses are hoping the coming sales will build on a number of successful offerings— including a $48 million Raphael sold in December—that appear to indicate an art market turnaround. The coming two weeks could thus be a crucial period for re-establishing price levels that have dropped amid a global recession, dealers said.

Continue reading — Chinese Loom as Art-Sale Players

Follower of Leonardo da Vinci, probably before 1750, “Portrait of a Woman”, called “La Belle Ferronnière”. (55 x 43.5 cm) 21 5/8 x 17 1/8 inches. Est. $300/500,000. Sold for more than $1.5 million. Photo: Sotheby’s.
A portrait once believed to have been painted by Leonardo da Vinci sold for more than $1.5 million in New [...]

One afternoon not too long ago, a truck arrived on Park Avenue, delivering a batch of Impressionist paintings from a family’s home in the Hamptons to their apartment in Manhattan. With some but not all of the art unpacked, the lady and man of the house went out for the evening, leaving instructions for their [...]

Agnolo Bronzino’s was the hand to hire for a power portrait in mid-16th-century Florence. He could turn toddlers into potentates and make new-money Medicis look like decent people. His painting shaped late Mannerism, the profane, twisty, prosthetic style that erupted, like a repressed libido, between the humanist sanctities of the Renaissance and the smells and [...]

A Christie’s employee looks at a 1963 painting entitled “Tete de femme (Jacqueline)” by Pablo Picasso on display at the auction house in London, Wednesday, Jan. 20, 2010. The painting is to be auction at ‘Impressionist and Modern Art’ sale on Feb. 2 with an estimated price of 3 to 4 million pounds (US$4.9 to [...]

Detail from Self-Portrait 1889, by Vincent Van Gogh
The title of the Royal Academy’s groundbreaking new show, The Real Van Gogh: the Artist and his Letters, signals the intention of the curators to dispense with the myth of the madman touched with genius, to present instead the art of a consummate professional.
From the first gallery, we [...]

What is the most important work of British art of recent decades? One contender is the stunning installation 20:50, created by the sculptor Richard Wilson in 1987, when Damien Hirst was still just a pugnaciously precocious student at art school, and now reprised in the Saatchi Gallery off the King’s Road in London.
Over the years, [...]