Word: auction
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Dayton Art Institute, where the director, Siegfried Weng, asked for advice from the FBI and New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. The paintings were declared genuine, but technically they were enemy property, and the U.S. promptly impounded them. In fact, they were nearly sold at auction until the State Department intervened, pointing out that as the property of a public museum, they belonged to the German people. The works were then deposited in the National Gallery-in ground floor vaults...
...language in movable type. Both are as common as telephone books compared to a handwritten Caxton manuscript. When the Englishman's 15th century translation of the first nine books of the Roman poet Ovid's Metamorphoses, a series of moralizing fables, was sold at auction in London's Sotheby's (TIME, July 8), the illustrated gem fetched $252,000-a record high for any book ever sold to the public. A New York dealer bought it, and the 272-page manuscript seemed destined to remain forever separate from the other six books of the Meta morphoses...
...satchel. After all, they said, "it has his initials on it, and the tag says The Honorable Hubert H. Humphrey.'" When the Vice President and his wife moved into their new southwest Washington apartment in October, they agreed to let their electrician, Paul Varoutsos, and his wife Jeanette auction off some of the junk at the old Humphrey house in Chevy Chase, Md., donating the proceeds to the local Children's Hospital. So far, the Humphreys' white elephants have raised...
...years ago. "It will be our sons who go into ecstasies over his canvases." Indeed, he is now ranked with Cezanne as one of the major precursors of 20th century painting. The problem is that his once scorned works are now so highly prized (a rare Manet at auction a year ago brought $450,000) that museums and collectors are loath to part with what have become their most precious possessions...
...When things are going badly at the Bourse," explains Paris Auctioneer Philippe Rheims, "business is booming at the Hotel Drouot," France's largest auction house. Buyers are holding on to what they have and are eager to buy more. Consequently, things that would have been passed up by connoisseurs a decade ago are now fetching some farfetched prices. Pre-Raphaelite drawings, early Americana and Louis XIII furniture have increased over last season's record-smashing pace. Peregrine Pollen, president of Manhattan's Parke-Bernet, is still stunned that a 16th century bronze brought...