Word: auctioner
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Flocking to Australia's first major auction of the works of Portraitist (and TIME Cover Artist) William Dobell, eager Sydney art lovers anted up $116,730 for 36 paintings that Dobell himself had originally peddled for a total of $1,300. Conceding that "two-or maybe five-of them are pictures of which I am not ashamed," Dobell was nonetheless astounded at his new rating in the art market. His first reaction: "People must have more money than sense." As abruptly as he had jettisoned them three years ago, Monaco's absolutist Prince Rainier III, 38, restored...
...protect Britain's treasures from falling into the hands of acquisitive American millionaires. Now the fund was out to protect Leonardo's exquisite drawing of the Virgin and child with St. Anne and St. John the Baptist, which its owner, the Royal Academy, intended to sell at auction to get itself out of the red. The fund had decided to launch a public appeal "to secure this incomparable treasure for the nation," would start things off by donating ?50,000 from its own coffers. Everyone agreed that the noble lord had nobly performed, but last week some Britons...
...touch of whimsy in its stratagems for raising funds. Originally its gaiety appeared inappropriate: a preference for musicals composed by undergraduates but possessing few other virtues once nearly drove Grant-in-Aid out of business. Now they have settled for the solider stuff of Broadway musicals; they sponsor an auction of things forgotten and unclaimed; they even (alas) run the freshman mixer. Held against the grey formality of the Financial Aids Office, their fund looks filled with life and color; it is eminently worth preserving...
Slated to go on the auction block at London's Sotheby's in April were 34 impressionist and post-impressionist paintings (among the best known: Picasso's Death of a Harlequin) from the collection of Multimillionaire Storyteller Somerset Maugham, 88. Anticipated proceeds: upwards of $1,400,000, which, along with most of the rest of his estate, Maugham has earmarked for Britain's Incorporated Society of Authors, Playwrights and Composers to spare "needy authors from doing hack work...
...unless they happen to be conspiring to distort competition, dealers are likely to object to the fact that what appears to be free competition in the bidding is not really free at all. It is now standard practice in some auction houses to set a "reserve" on each work up for sale: if the bidding does not go beyond a certain price, the auctioneer simply pretends to accept a final bid and lets the work revert to the seller without his having to pay any commission to the house. Since other potential buyers have no idea of what the reserve...