Word: auction
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...single sentence had been heard so often among people in the New York art world that it began to sound a bit like a secret password: "I suppose I'll be seeing you Wednesday night." On the night in question last week, the nation's biggest auction house, Parke-Bernet Galleries, sold off a group of 24 paintings that had been collected by the late advertising executive Alfred William Erickson and his wife Anna. Among the paintings was Rembrandt's Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer, which bears the unhappy nickname of "The Million-Dollar Rembrandt." Though...
...issued about 850 tickets for seats and standing room in the main gallery, but almost twice as many people showed up on the big night, and tickets were selling for $50 on the black market. A queue began forming on the sidewalk more than an hour before the auction was to begin; not only Parke-Bernet's main gallery, but also three others, equipped with closed-circuit TV, were jammed to overflowing. Everyone from Billy Rose to Paul Mellon, from Perle Mesta to Director James Rorimer of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was on hand. No art auction...
Between October 1958 and July 1959, the gross at Sotheby's was $16 million, including $770,000 for a Peter Paul Rubens (see opposite page), until last week the highest price ever paid at an auction. A Gauguin Tahitian scene, owned by George Goodyear of Buffalo, fetched $364,000. Cezanne's Peasant in a Blue Blouse got $406,000; and Gainsborough's Mr. and Mrs. Robert Andrews brought $364,000, the top price ever paid at an auction for an English painting...
...Auctions: Theory & Practice. In theory, auctioning a work is the most accurate way to put a price on the priceless; in practice, its major visible flaw is "auction fever," in which rich amateurs get carried away and bid against one another to force prices up from 25% to 60% more than prudence dictates. But-also in practice-there is more to many an auction than the eye can see, mostly stemming from the fact that art dealers often comprise about three-fourths of the bidders...
...keep the market up for a particular artist, for example, a dealer may place a work on sale, then bid it up himself so that the price for that artist will reach a new plateau. In another dodge, dishonest dealers sometimes hold pre-auction conspiracies among themselves: they buy shares in a work that is scheduled for the block and select one of their number to bid on it while all the rest pledge themselves to remain silent. With the competition thus limited, the selected dealer gets the work at a low price. When he, in turn, sells...