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 [...]

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 [...]

You can’t help but wonder just how many of the smartly dressed people sitting night after night at Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Phillips de Pury over the next two weeks will be serious bidders and how many will be voyeurs hoping to witness an implosion of the multibillion dollar art market. For years collectors and the [...]

The phone call was routine, the kind often made before big auctions. Sotheby’s was preparing to sell a striking rust-brown image of a leaf on paper, long thought to have been made by William Henry Fox Talbot, one of the inventors of photography. So the auction house contacted a Baltimore historian considered to be the [...]

Lucian Freud’s one-time muse was paid £20 a day to sit for a painting expected to fetch more than £17m. But Londoner Sue Tilley said she did not do it for the money and had “lovely lunches” with the artist. Freud’s 1995 work, Benefits Supervisor Sleeping, looks set to become the most expensive painting by [...]

“Two Wandering Tigers” by Cai Guo-Qiang Sotheby’s sold $51.77 million worth of Chinese contemporary art in three auctions in Hong Kong on Wednesday, allaying concerns that the global economic slowdown would depress the prices. The highlight of the day was the highly anticipated afternoon sale of more than 100 works from the Estella Collection, which [...]