Word: auction
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...London tenaciously holds first place as the big-money auction market. Sotheby's of London, long intent on extending to New York its primacy in art sales, is this week trying to acquire Manhattan's top-ranking Parke-Bernet Galleries. Christie's, London's other major house, plans to stage what will probably be the biggest auction ever (estimated proceeds: up to $5,600,000) when it sells off the late Captain George Spencer-Churchill's fabulous Northwick art collection of 500 old masters next December...
...when Vasily Kandinsky laid down his brush upon finishing a certain watercolor represents what is often regarded as the birth of abstract painting. Last week Manhattan's Guggenheim Museum put the pioneer abstractionist's modern-day reputation to a bold test: at the London art auction house of Sotheby & Co., the museum offered for sale no less than 50 of its 170 Kandinskys. Fears that such a mass sale might depress the market proved unwarranted. For it was painting from Kandinsky's early abstractionist period that brought the top money-$140,000 for one Improvisation, a record...
...they come. The Chilean navy recently fought a noisy battle with the crew of a freighter loaded with a contraband cargo of cigarettes, whisky and, of course, soap. In Venezuela police found themselves confiscating the same launch three times-the smugglers simply kept buying it back at auction. In Argentina one crafty operator kept police baffled by using two planes with the same markings and registration-one for smuggling and one for legitimate freight. Other pros ship Scotch in gasoline tankers, diamonds in chunky chocolate bars, cigarettes under false truck floor boards...
...chain had established its Cincinnati monopoly quite by chance. In 1956, it owned only one of the city's three competing dailies, the Post. Then the Enquirer, which had been bought from the estate of the paper's publisher by Enquirer employees, went back on the auction block. Scripps-Howard's bid topped that of Cincinnati's other evening paper, the independently owned Times-Star. In 1958, the Times-Star, which was losing money at the rate of $1,000,000 a year, sold out to the Post and vanished into its masthead...
Along with Dun & Bradstreet reports, file drawers in his secretary's office are stuffed with Wildenstein catalogues, Parke-Bernet auction lists, and color transparencies. On his desk sits a tiny Daumier bronze of a humble country bumpkin. He also wants his employees to appreciate art, gives them plenty to look at. Rarely have they failed to enjoy it, but once he had to take down a Leger tapestry of a mechanical man in the office foyer. Employees read themselves uncomfortably into the image...