Giacometti breaks record (2)

The video of the auction can be viewed here. "On your marks..."

Giacometti breaks record

One of Alberto Giacometti’s best-loved bronzes, "Walking Man I", broke the world record price for a work of art at auction, selling to an unidentified telephone bidder for $92.5 million, or $104.3 million with fees at Sotheby’s in London on Wednesday night. The previous record was $104.1 million, paid for Picasso’s 1905 "Boy With a Pipe (The Young Apprentice)" at Sotheby’s in New York in 2004.

Read more at nytimes.com and in your favorite newspaper.

A thing of beauty

The Economist has a "special report on the rich", which includes an article on art prices. Read it here.

Big bucks for Bacon

Ever wondered why Francis Bacon's work has become so exceptionally highly priced? The Art Newspaper explains. The Bacon exhibition at the Tate opened last week.

The recipe for a record price

Auction house hype, media frenzy, and billionaire buyers.

Nobody understands better than an auction house that price appreciation of this magnitude is seldom intrinsic to the work.

Andy, Pablo and Francis

A couple of weeks ago, Artprice.com published its yearly overview of art market trends. It contains interesting insights in the "suicidal competition" in the art market and the remarkable rise of contemporary Chinese art (for example from Zhang Xiaogang and Yue Minjun). Anyway, 2007 might have been the last year without Asian artists in the top-10 of artists based on the total revenue generated by public sales (2006 ranking between brackets):

1 (2) Andy Warhol [422 million USD]
2 (1) Pablo Picasso [320 million USD]
3 (19) Francis Bacon [245 million USD]

4 (79) Mark Rothko
5 (14) Claude Monet
6 (9) Henri Matisse
7 (37) Jean-Michel Basquiat
8 (26) Fernand Léger
9 (6) Marc Chagall
10 (17) Paul Cézanne

Have fallen out of the top-10 this year: Modigliani, De Kooning, Gauguin, Liechtenstein, Schiele and Klimt.

Another Belgian in America

Last week, I went to see one of the most expensive paintings ever sold: 'Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I', by Gustav Klimt. The work hangs in the beautiful Neue Galerie, in New York. I was happy to see that Adele is flanked by two nice sculptures by George Minne, a Belgian Symbolist artist.

At the end of 2007, the New York Sun reported: "Exactly 100 years ago, Gustav Klimt's iconic portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, now enthroned in the Neue Galerie and possibly the most famous painting in New York, was exhibited in Vienna between two soulful and sinewy sculptures by the Belgian artist George Minne. Today, after a tumultuous century of world wars and totalitarian regimes, the two sculptures have turned up on the Upper East Side at the Neue Galerie. There, once again, they flank the ethereal Frau Bloch-Bauer. All three works had belonged to her family before they were confiscated by the Nazis. Two years ago, after the Klimt portrait was finally "restituted" to her descendants, they sold it to the Neue Galerie. Now they have donated these two sculptures."

Read the full story here.

Tintin in America

AFP reports: "Captain Haddock would have choked on his whisky: original artwork for a Tintin comic book fetched a record 764,200 euros (1.2 million dollars) at a Paris auction Saturday, organiser Artcurial said.

The 1932 oil painting, executed for the iconic cover of "Tintin in America" smashed the previous world record for an original comic book work. That was set in March 2007 when a drawing by artist Enki Bilal called Bleu Sang (Blue Blood) fetched 177,000 euros.

Judged a "museum piece" in Artcurial's auction catalogue, the painting by Tintin's Belgian creator Herge finally sold for 764,200 euros, including expenses. Total earnings for Saturday's one-off sale of 650 comic originals -- each of which had a starting price of 280,000 euros -- came to roughly 3.4 million euros, the gallery and auction house said."

Weak dollar, record sales...

...at Sotheby's in London.

“The global hunger for great works of art is here to stay,” said auctioneer Tobias Meyer after the evening’s heady sale. “It’s become a 20th century masterpiece market.”

Heart of gold

Bloomberg reports: "A nearly 9-foot-tall, stainless- steel heart by Jeff Koons, estimated to sell for as much as $20 million, could set an auction record for a living artist at Sotheby's contemporary art sale on Nov. 14 in New York." The current auction record for Jeff Koons is $5.6 million. Reflecting on the upcoming auction, Sotheby's head of contemporary art, Tobias Meyer, said: "Whatever the market will be, the market will be. No one will know until that night, but this is great and I'm confident." You can watch a movie on the heart and its sale here.

(The heart weighs around 1600 kilograms, "as much as a compact Mercedes".)

The auction sensation of the century?

According to The Independent, Sotheby's will soon auction one of Van Gogh's last masterpieces, namely The Fields: "The Fields will be unveiled at Sotheby's in London on 7 October and sold at auction in New York a month later with an estimated list price £17m. But due to its extraordinary provenance and the booming art market, it is likely to provoke one of the heaviest bidding wars in the auction house's history and greatly exceed this price. When the painting was exhibited in Amsterdam in 2001, as a privately owned work, there was an immediate, if vain, rush by buyers to place offers." The Independent already speaks of the "auction sensation of the century".

In a related article, one of Britain's most fashionable "young" artists, Tracey Emin, comments on the piece.

Update: Sotheby's released a press statement concerning the sale.

Drab mediocrity

The January issue of Art + Auction comments on the big November sales of both Sotheby's and Christie's. Although the Sotheby's evening sale of Impressionist and modern art was one of the most successful of all time, "the impression that the viewing left on most connoisseurs was one of drab mediocrity". According to the editor, there is now such a widespread desire to buy art that "there's no longer much of a correlation between price and artistic merit". More than $8.5m for a minor work of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec doesn't raise eyebrows anymore.

One day later, Christie's had its big evening sale, dubbed "a crazed frenzy" by Art + Auction. World auction records were set for Gauguin ($40m), Kirchner ($38m) and Klimt ($88m). Perhaps even more astonishing was, again, the prices paid for some other works. One of the best examples is perhaps this small charcoal-on-paper sketch by Piet Mondriaan (picture). It fetched no less than $3.3m. Art + Auction concludes: "Had aesthetics been the predominant concern that week, certains coups here and there would not have been possible."

Rather a nightmare

In 1932, Picasso made a portrait of his mistress. Nowadays, 'Le Rêve' is seen as one of his top-works. Steve Wynn, the owner of the painting, was to sell it a few weeks ago for $139 million. That was before he poked his elbow through the painting. His first reaction was, understandably, one of unbelief: "I can’t believe I just did that. Oh, shit. Oh, man." He told his guests: "Well, I’m glad I did it and not you."

A few hours later, Wynn was already in a cheerful mood: "My feeling was: It’s a picture, it’s my picture, we’ll fix it. Nobody got sick or died. It’s a picture. It took Picasso five hours to paint it."

(Source: The New Yorker)

The true value of art ?

In may 2004, 'Garçon à la Pipe' by Pablo Picasso was sold at Sotheby's New York for $104.1 million. The morning after the sale, a Picasso expert was quoted in The Washington Post: "I'm stunned, that a pleasant, minor painting could command a price appropriate to a real masterwork by Picasso. This just shows how much the marketplace is divorced from the true values of art."