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 [...]

Christie’s in London sold Claude Monet’s “‘Le bassin aux nympheas” for £40,921,250 / $80,451,178 / €51,683,539
Christie’s Impressionist and Modern Art Evening Sale took place this evening (24 June 2008) and realised £144,440,500 / $283,970,023 / €182,428,352 - the highest ever total for an art auction held in Europe. The top lot of the auction was [...]

HIS 1954 Picasso became the most expensive painting sold in Australia when it went under the hammer last night for $6.9 million.
The oil on canvas, named Sylvette, depicts a 19-year-old woman in bright colours and semi-abstract, geometric forms. Sylvette was painted by Picasso when he was in his 80s and living on the Cote d’Azur [...]

The first part of Sotheby’s sale of Contemporary Art at the Galerie Charpentier in Paris totaled €20,384,750, with works from French, European and American collections the majority of them fresh to the market including paintings by Francis Bacon, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Joan Mitchell and Robert Rauschenberg, as well as four works from the Estate of President [...]

A 1976 triptych by Francis Bacon brought $86.3 million on Wednesday night at Sotheby’s, becoming the most expensive work of contemporary art ever sold at auction and a retort to doomsayers who had predicted that the art market would falter seriously this season because of broad economic anxieties.
“Recession? What recession?” Barbara Gladstone, a Chelsea dealer, [...]

Sotheby’s sale of Impressionist and modern art on Wednesday proved to be a solid if unexciting evening. Experts there, however, pronounced it “fantastic,” as if to again reassure buyers and sellers that the art market was alive and well despite setbacks in the financial and real estate markets.
As was true at Christie’s auction of Impressionist [...]