Word: auctioner
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...Earlier this month in Manhattan, the highest amount ever brought by a poster at auction -$26,000-went for Toulouse-Lautrec's color lithograph of Parisian Cabaret Singer Aristide Bruant...
...sale in years has come closer to craziness than Sotheby Parke Bernet's Auction 4290 in Manhattan on Oct. 25. It took only three minutes and 45 seconds to gavel down Frederic Edwin Church's The Icebergs for $2.5 million. That was the third highest bid ever made for a painting at auction* and more than twice as much as any other American work of art has ever fetched (see ESSAY). In all, the 264 works by 146 American painters of the 19th and 20th centuries posted a record for a sale...
Sotheby Parke Bernet's 4290 was a landmark sale: the prices realized at the auction will serve as reference points for years to come. Thus in the hierarchy of cash a relatively obscure artist by world standards ranks, for now at least, above any Dutch old master, any English painter, any French impressionist, any American abstract expressionist, any sculptor...
Over the past six months, such objects as ivory and jade pieces and antique silverware have all recorded huge price increases at auction. Among several categories of fine arts that experts believe to be underpriced but rapidly appreciating in value: 17th century old master drawings and prints; Victorian furniture, paintings, drawings, porcelain, silver and antiques of all kinds; Japanese pottery and porcelain, ivory and enamels; Italian baroque paintings and Renaissance statuary; American primitives; Egyptian, Greek and Roman antiquities. Also upward bound are American Indian artifacts, antique gold watches, rare manuscripts, books and autographs, Victorian and Edwardian jewelry, and art deco...
Many other factors have combined to pump up the proceeds. First-rate works of art are in short supply, and becoming ever more scarce, as the auction catalogues-if not the sales figures-sadly reflect. The prizes go mostly these days to citizens of nations that do not extract excessive taxes from the wealthy: Switzerland, France, West Germany, Japan and the Arab countries. Americans remain very much in the market, however, thanks in part to U.S. tax laws that permit a collector to deduct contributions from his taxable estate if he has willed his treasures to a museum. The museums...