One of the most important works by artist Pablo Picasso is to be sold at auction in New York. Picasso’s Arlequin was last seen in public 45 years ago and is expected to fetch over $30m (£16.3m) when it goes under the hammer in November. The Cubist painting was owned by Surrealist artist Enrico Donati, [...]
auctions
Sotheby’s November 3, 2008 evening sale of Impressionist and Modern Art in New York will feature an exceptionally rare masterpiece by Edvard Munch — Vampire, from 1894. This emotionally charged image numbers among the most iconic compositions in art history. A spectacular representation of love, sex and death, Vampire created a sensation when it was [...]
Visitors encounter “The Golden Calf” by Damien Hirst, which at $18.6 million was the top seller of Sotheby’s two-day sale. It was as if Sotheby’s here was a little oasis far removed from the grim news of the financial world. In less than 24 hours, giant tanks of dead sharks, zebras and piglets submerged in [...]
Including a whole new body of work that covers the complete range of Hirst’s output and more, the auction will run over two days, commencing with an Evening Sale on Monday, 15 September, and continuing throughout the following day (Tuesday, 16 September) with a morning and afternoon session. The two day sale, which will include [...]
Christie’s International PLC said it sold $3.5 billion of fine and decorative art in the first half, up 7.7% from the same period last year and up 56% from two years ago, indicating that the art market is healthy even as collectors of new art pull back after a five-year shopping spree. Sotheby’s won’t release [...]
A recently rediscovered masterpiece by Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684-1721) sold at Christie’s auction of Important Old Master and British Pictures this evening for £12,361,250 / $24,376,385 / €15,513,369, a world record price for any French Old Master painting sold at auction. La Surprise had been missing for almost 200 years, presumed to have been destroyed, and [...]
Works by Francis Bacon have been big sellers at auction recently, and Christie’s sale of postwar and contemporary art here on Monday was no different. Four tenacious bidders vied for his “Three Studies for Self-Portrait” from 1975 in what became the evening’s longest bidding war, with two would-be buyers on the phone still running up [...]

