Word: auctioned
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...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...
Gentle, high-minded and peaceable stands the artist at his easel, mind, heart and soul intent on creation. Shrewd, suspicious and materialistic stands the artist in the marketplace, protecting his interests with a zeal that would make a pawnbroker blush. The most meaningful U.S. marketplace is the auction room at Parke-Bernet Galleries in Manhattan; and when Parke-Bernet announced for last week an end-of-season clearance sale of modern masters that promised to set prices, the art world got alert...