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A Menagerie of French Whimsy Takes Auction Prices 'to the Next Level'
PARIS — “Two million!” screamed a voice from the crush of Sotheby’s staff members taking instructions from telephone bidders.
Spring Art Sales: Yawns or Records?
NEW YORK — The marquee auctions of impressionist, modern and contemporary art in New York next week are the first crunch moment of the year for the top end of the art market.Poor No More, but Still Sexy? Berlin Seeks Its Art World Niche
BERLIN — Most of the World War II bullet holes have been filled in, the legendary 1990s rave venues redeveloped. Rents are rising and so are block after block of luxury apartments. Tech startups are flourishing.Big Changes at Britain's Saatchi Gallery, as Visitor Numbers Slide
LONDON — The Saatchi Gallery, Britain’s best-known and most popular private museum of cutting-edge contemporary art, is now operating as a nonprofit after a downturn in business and a decline in visitor numbers.Masterpiece or Mistake? A Hawaii Museum's $7.5 Million Question
It was a generous gift — and one completely in tune with our cultural times.Going, Going, Gone: Explaining Auction Houses' Executive Exodus
It’s been a memorable year in the art world, not for what happened, but for who left.
Female artists with African backgrounds are winners at Phillips auction in London
British-Ghanaian painter Lynette Yiadom-Boakye and the more established South African painter Marlene Dumas both had paintings sell to telephone bidders for about twice their estimates.
Koons sculpture smashes record for work by a living artist
NEW YORK — A shiny stainless steel sculpture created by Jeff Koons in 1986, inspired by a child’s inflatable toy, sold at Christie’s on Wednesday night for $91.1 million with fees, smashing the record at auction for a work by a living artist, set just last November by David Hockney.
Koons work sets mark with $91.1 million sale
NEW YORK — A shiny stainless steel sculpture created by Jeff Koons in 1986, inspired by a child’s inflatable toy, sold at Christie’s on Wednesday night for $91.1 million with fees, smashing the record at auction for a work by a living artist, set just last November by David Hockney.
Record set for impressionists by $110.7 million for a Monet
NEW YORK — After eight minutes of heated competition, Claude Monet’s 1890 painting “Meules” sold for $110.7 million on Tuesday, an auction high for the artist and the most ever for any Impressionist work, according to Sotheby’s in New York, which handled the sale.
The secret art collection of a reclusive Italian tycoon is unveiled
TURIN, Italy — The room is lined with dark red paneling and gold-framed mirrors. The 18th-century Italian furniture is opulently rococo. A sentimental late Renoir painting, “Young Woman with Roses,” hangs in front of shelves filled with finely bound bibliographical volumes. There are gilded knickknacks everywhere.
Is that a real Caravaggio? It's all in the detail
Turquin has spent the past five years researching this unsigned painting. He is convinced it is a long-lost masterpiece by Caravaggio.
Masterpiece or Mistake? A Hawaii Museum's $7.5 million question
This private act of restitution came amid a growing clamor for Western collections to return ethnographic artifacts to their places of origin.
Why John Ruskin, born 200 years ago, is the man of the moment
The subject of a 2014 movie and a fair amount of inconclusive scholarly research, his miserable six-year marriage with a woman almost a decade his junior was annulled in 1854 on the grounds of Ruskin’s “incurable impotency.”
Restitution fears unsettle the trade in tribal art
Schoffel, a dealer based in Brussels, who has been trading in tribal art for 11 years, had just completed negotiations over a cellphone with a French collector during the Friday preview of the Brafa art fair.
Finding new value in the work of anonymous shutterbugs
This is the realm of “vernacular photography,” the catchall term for snapshots that amateurs have been taking since 1888, when George Eastman introduced the first hand-held Kodak camera, priced at $25 (about $600 today).
