Word: auction
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...everyone will be so lucky as the Massachusetts schoolteacher who picked up a primitive watercolor for 35¢ at a church auction and sold it 35 years later for $22,000. Or the Philadelphia couple who 30 years ago bought a Ming vase for $400 and sold it for $260,000. But an increasing number of people are finding that collecting antiques (art, furniture and objects at least 100 years old) can be enormously rewarding, both aesthetically and financially...
...result, the antiques market is at present enjoying an unprecedented boom. The demand for a piece of the past was such that the auction houses hammered down one record after another in 1977: rare books ($360,000 for John James Audubon's Birds of America), Sèvres porcelain ($102,600 for Marie Antoinette's delicately painted milk pail), American furniture ($135,000 for a Boston-made mahogany bombé chest, circa 1780), even tin toys ($3,105 for a Mickey Mouse organ grinder...
...cash in on the action, the London auction firms of Christie's and Phillips, along with French Dealer Didier Aaron, opened branches in Manhattan last year. Since opening in May, Christie's reaped sales of $20 million?50% over original projections. Sotheby Parke Bernet reports that sales for the past four months were $43.7 million, up 53% over last year...
...British paintings to Yale, had been considered the most likely foreign buyer if the Tate fell short. But Mellon, a self-styled "galloping Anglophile," felt the paintings should stay in England. He contributed four paintings from his private collection, two Vuillards, a Bonnard and a Giacometti, to a benefit auction. They went for about $90,000, and soon, with more than a little help from the British government, the two Stubbs found themselves safely ensconced in the Tate. British art lovers could breathe easy?for a while at least...
...cavernous California mountain lodge, some 40 smiling people, their shiny, shaved heads reflecting the dancing flames of a roaring fire, oohed, ahed and applauded. A lawyer had just pledged to file ten divorces for the ten highest bidders at a fund-raising auction on New Year's Eve. At a wooden table a grizzled, gruff man who wears a cap emblazoned with the message I'M THE MEANEST S.O.B. IN THE VALLEY nodded his approval. Charles (Chuck) Dederich, 64, was adding another ritual to his famed commune Synanon: wife swapping...