Displaying items by tag: Auction

In January, Sotheby’s will offer an American folk art collection with some dark and risqué imagery. The auction consignors, Petra and Stephen Levin, philanthropists based in Florida, had filled their Vermont home with woodcarvings of prostitutes wrapped around clients ($30,000 to $50,000 for two pairs) and a shoeshine boy leering at a female customer’s legs ($30,000 to $50,000). In a diorama of a bar crowded with disheveled drunks ($20,000 to $30,000), cigarette butts are smeared on the floor.

A Richard Avedon photograph has reportedly been withdrawn from an auction at Christie's over complaints by the Avedon Foundation.

The photo, a 1962 portrait of ballet icon Rudolf Nureyev, belongs to ballet dancer Eric Walters, who says he bought it at Christie's in 1995 for just $1,610, according to the New York Post. But when Walters tried to sell the photo this year at the same auction house with a high estimate of $15,000, the Avedon Foundation, which is based in New York, stepped in.

Phillips has been entrusted with the sale of selected artworks by Le Corbusier from the Heidi Weber Museum Collection. The most comprehensive selection of his artworks to be presented at auction, it is offered from the collection of one of his most prominent patrons, Heidi Weber, who housed many of the works in the Heidi Weber Museum / Centre Le Corbusier, her private museum in Zurich designed by the artist and dedicated to showing his artistic works. Consisting of over 50 works and including paintings, sculptures, enamels, tapestries and works on paper, the collection will be offered at various-owner auctions in London and New York over the next three years and is conservatively expected to realize in excess of $30 million.

A. Alfred Taubman, the late billionaire developer and former owner of Sotheby’s auction house, was a boundless art collector whose taste spanned every period, genre and medium, from works of antiquity to contemporary art.

In advance of a series of sales of his 500-piece collection — believed to be worth more than $500 million — Sotheby’s has transformed its building inside and out to give a real sense of its depth and scope.

Though Christie’s elected not to publicly list the estimated sale price for Louise Bourgeois’s Spider (1997), which will be auctioned as lot 10 in the house’s postwar and contemporary evening sale on November 10 in New York, it is high enough to break some major records.

ARTnews has learned that the enormous sculpture will have a low estimate of $25 million and a high estimate of $35 million.

Orazio Gentileschi's Danaë (1621) will arrive at Sotheby's New York this January with an estimate of $25 to $35 million. The 17th-century painting provides a lens to reflect on just how far the Old Masters market has come in the past few decades.

The painting, which has an extensive exhibition history, including shows at the Getty, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Yale University, also has an interesting past in terms of provenance.

Christie’s Important Jewels sale, held October 20 in New York, brought $20.0 million, with white and yellow diamonds fetching the highest prices.

The top lot for the sale was a cushion-cut fancy vivid yellow diamond ring of 75.56 carats, which realized $3.6 million, within its pre-sale estimate of $3 million to $4 million.

An untitled and undated artwork described as a “painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat that has been authenticated as original,” is up for sale next month in Nashville, Tenn.—and could bring upwards of $2 million.

It is being sold by Aberdeen, Miss.-based Stevens Auction Company, which has been in the business for 31 years.The auctioneer said it can trace the artwork’s ownership back decades.

A masterpiece of the American pop art movement hits the auction block in New York next month, expected to set a new record for artist Roy Lichtenstein and continue a record-setting year in art sales.

Christie’s has set the low estimate for Lichtenstein’s iconic “Nurse” at $80 million, but believes it could fetch in excess of $100 million at a specially curated evening sale in New York on November 9.

When Fredric Brandt, the plastic surgeon to the stars, took his own life earlier this year, he left behind a trove of artworks that might have surprised those who thought his tastes were purely cosmetic. His collection, scattered between his homes in New York and Miami, includes works by Wool, Baldessari, Stingel, and Oehlen, and when it came time to find an auction house for the estate, Phillips emerged victorious after a fairly competitive jostle. It began readying the sale of 200 works, valued at $15 million in total, and 18 of these works went on sale tonight, at the house’s contemporary art evening sale in London.