Displaying items by tag: clients

To a medley of whoops, hollers and gasps on Monday night, Pablo Picasso’s 1955 painting “Les Femmes d’Alger (Version ‘O’)” sold for $179.4 million including fees at Christie’s “Looking Forward to the Past” sale of artworks spanning the 20th century. The price was the highest on record for a work of art sold at auction, the company said, and was well over its estimate of $140 million.

Once the bidding reached $120 million, the Picasso was pursued by five clients on telephones, often in agonizingly slow, $1 million increments, before finally being sold to a buyer represented by Brett Gorvy, Christie’s international head of contemporary art.

Following a trial that was prominently covered in the German press due to its illustrious protagonists, particularly the heirs of billionaire Berthold Albrecht, one of the founders of the German discount supermarket chain Aldi, German art consultant Helge Achenbach was found guilty of fraud by the District Court in Essen and sentenced to six years in prison on Monday.

The 62- year old used to be one of Germany’s most influential art consultants, entertaining long-term business relationships with some of the country’s wealthiest collectors. Berthold Albrecht, who passed in 2012, was one of his most important clients. Achenbach had repeatedly inflated the net purchase prices for art works and vintage cars he procured for Albrecht and other clients.

The 18th-century cabinetmaker Nathaniel Gould left inkblots in his battered gray notebooks as he recorded the luxurious mahogany output of his workshop in Salem, Mass. His listings of clients and fees, found seven years ago in forgotten boxes at the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston, have enabled researchers to attribute his mostly unsigned antiques. Next weekend, about 20 of these pieces will go on view at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem in the exhibition “In Plain Sight: Discovering the Furniture of Nathaniel Gould.”

The show’s catalog blends tragic family lore with statistics. Gould’s clients lost their furniture in fires, their fortunes in bankruptcies and war and their family members in shipwrecks. Coffins for children were among his workshop’s frequent commissions.

According to The Art Newspaper, Christie’s has boosted its seller’s commission in its contracts with consignors. The auction house will now charge 2% of the hammer price of a work that meets or exceeds its high estimate. After the 2% performance fee, Christie’s charges commission using a sliding scale based on a work’s final hammer price.

In order to attract powerful sellers offering blue-chip works, auction houses often waive the seller’s commission for preferred clients. Christie’s new 2% performance fee, which is in addition to the fixed buyer’s premium (the percentage of the hammer price paid by the buyer), ensures that the auction house will receive a portion of the profits from both sides of a blockbuster sale.

A growing desire to understand and prove the provenance of goods in the fake-ridden Chinese antiques market has led to a boom in old auction and exhibition catalogues. This trade has been driven by China’s tens of thousands of art advisors, auction houses and dealers, who in recent years have been building private reference libraries for experts and clients. Book collectors and dealers in Hong Kong and Europe have been quietly doing a thriving business in catalogues for exhibitions and auctions of Chinese arts and antiques.

While China has always had a black market for imported art publications that cost a few dollars each, in-demand catalogues command prices in the thousands of dollars.

Christie’s first-half sales increased by 9% thanks in part to its record postwar and contemporary art sale, the most expensive auction ever held. The sale, which took place May 15th in New York, garnered $495 million and set 23 new salesroom highs for artists including Jackson Pollock and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Christie’s brought in over $1 billion in total contemporary art sales.

Interest in postwar and contemporary art has increased significantly in the past few years. This year alone Christie’s saw a 52% rise in new clients bidding on contemporary works less than $200,000. The auction house’s second most lucrative category was impressionist and modern art, which fetched over $625 million during the first-half.

Christie’s releases its sales total twice a year. The auction house’s total first-half sales reached $3.6 billion.

Glafira Rosales, a 56-year-old Long Island-based art dealer has been arrested in connection to the scandal surrounding the disgraced Manhattan gallery, Knoedler & Company. One of many suits stemming from the ongoing Knoedler drama, federal authorities charged Rosales with tax fraud following the discovery that a collection of Modernist masterpieces, which sold for millions of dollars were actually forgeries.

Prosecutors claim that Rosales never disclosed the $12.5 million she made off of the sale. It was also discovered that she maintained a bank account in Spain where she had stashed much of her earnings from the transaction. If convicted on all counts, Rosales faces as many as 34 years in prison but based on federal sentencing guidelines, will most likely receive much less.

Rosales began selling forged works through the offices of Knoedler & Company in the mid-1990s. The works were new to the market and they were said to have come from an unnamed collector based in Zurich and Mexico City. Knoedler accepted the works and proceeded to sell them, bringing millions of dollars in revenue. After multiple experts claimed that Knoedler was selling fakes, the F.B.I. launched an official investigation. Knoedler closed in 2011 after 165 years in business. The company, which had been New York’s oldest gallery, found itself at the center of 6 lawsuits filed by clients who had purchased Rosales’ works.

While tax evasion charges have been leveled against her, Rosales still has not been charged with knowingly selling counterfeit artworks.

Prominent Canadian art collector David Mirvish filed a lawsuit on Friday, February 22, 2013 against the disgraced New York-based art gallery, Knoedler & Company. Since closing its doors in late 2011, Knoedler & Company has been accused by multiple clients of selling forged paintings, which were acquired by the gallery from Long Island dealer Glafira Rosales. Mirvish’s is the fifth lawsuit against Knoedler since 2011.

However, Mirvish’s claim is slightly different than its predecessors. While the other lawsuits accused Knoedler of passing off fake Jackson Pollock (1912-1956), Robert Motherwell (1915-1991), and Mark Rothko (1903-1970) paintings as the real deal, Mirvish claims that the works he purchased from the gallery were authentic. Instead, Mirvish is arguing that he lost out on millions of dollars in profits when Knoedler failed to sell three Jackson Pollock masterpieces he purchased jointly with the gallery.

Between 2002 and 2007 Mirvish purchased two paintings attributed to Pollock and bough a half stake in a third for $1.6 million. The sole purpose of Mirvish’s dealings with Knoedler was to resell the works for a profit. One of the Pollock paintings sold to collector and hedge fund manager Pierre Lagrange for $17 million in 2007, but in 2011, the day before Knoedler shut down, Lagrange announced that he would be filing a lawsuit against the gallery as forensic testing suggested the painting was a fake. The Lagrange suit was eventually settled but Mirvish was not involved and refused to return the money he made off of the deal.

Mirvish is now seeking reparations for the two unsold Pollocks, claiming that Knoedler breached its agreement when the gallery suddenly went out of business. Mirvish is asking Knoedler to return the two paintings, referred to as “Greenish Pollock” and “Square Pollock,” as well as reimburse him for his $1.6 million stake in the third painting, referred to as “Silver Pollock.” Even though Mirvish only paid Knoedler $3.25 million, half of “Greenish Pollock” and “Square Pollock’s” purchase prices, he claims that Knoedler’s violation of contract entitles him to both paintings.

Nicholas Gravante, the lawyer of Knoedler’s former president, Ann Freeman, is representing Mirvish. Freeman is not named as a defendant in Mirvish’s case and she has maintained that all works acquired from Rosales are genuine. Rosales is currently under investigation by the F.B.I.    

London’s historic Agnew’s Gallery, which announced earlier this month that they will be closing after nearly 200 years in business, plans to sell off its extensive library and archive after its doors shut on April 30, 2013. The remarkable archive is considered one of the most important and complete records of art market dealings to take place over the past two centuries. While Agnew’s specializes in Old Master paintings, the gallery has dealt in everything from Rembrandt (1606-1669) masterpieces to modern canvases by Francis Bacon (1909-1992).

The archive contains stock legers, which are extremely important to provenance research related to the gallery’s areas of expertise. There has been some speculation that the Getty Institute in Los Angeles will bid on the archive as they run a significant provenance research center. However, it is likely that officials will want to keep the archive in the UK.

The gallery’s chairman, Julian Agnew, will continue to work as an advisor to clients and plans to keep the company’s family name.  

The London gallery Agnews announced that it will be closing its doors on April 30, 2013 after nearly 200 years in business. One of the world’s oldest art dealers, Agnews, which specializes in Old Master paintings, will make a final appearance at the European Fine Art Fair in Maastricht (March 15- 24, 2013).

Business for Agnews has been cooling off since chairman, Julian Agnew, sold the gallery’s historic Bond street location for a reported $39 and moved to a smaller space. Agnew attempted to sell the business last year, but negotiations with a prospective buyer failed. The privately owned firm, which has 16 family shareholders, revealed a loss of almost $3 million in records dating back to 2011.

Agnews has been selling off its stock, which once included Old Master works by Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788), Anthony van Dyck (1599-1641), and Rembrandt (1606-1669) as well as watercolors and British paintings. Whatever is left in the gallery will be taken care of in due time. Agnew will continue to work as an advisor to clients and will keep the company’s family name.