Word: auctions
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Investors prefer the tangible gilt edges that frame art works to paper ones on stock exchanges these days. As a result, the world's auction houses started off the new season this month with a bang, despite a credit squeeze in the U.S., an economic freeze in Great Britain and a sagging Paris Bourse...
...takes discretion, judgment, finesse and expertise to run a first-rate art museum, it should take no less of those qualities to run a first-rate art auction house such as Christie's of London. Consider last week's strange case of the "discovered" Rubens...
Scent on the Hill. When Paris came in the auction-house door, judgment apparently flew out the window. Christie's director, David Carritt, was on vacation, and his evaluators, incredibly, attributed the work to a mediocre 17th century copyist named Lankrink, appraised it at $280, and placed it in the July 28 auction catalogue. Then it was hung in "the Hill," a long, sloping corridor where a few specialists are allowed to browse among works soon to be sold. There it was that Oliver Millar, deputy surveyor of the Queen's painting collection, paused and pondered...
According to standard art-market plots, Millar should have kept mum, sent an unknown agent to the auction and picked up a six-figure painting for a three-figure pittance. But as a public-service scholar and a proper servant of the Crown, he says, his only ethical course was to get the painting properly identified. Besides, as he somewhat testily adds, the Crown collection "already has a great number of Rubenses." Millar sought out Christie's Carritt, diffidently asked: "Isn't that a rather important picture you've got in your sale?" Carritt took a quick...
...rumor spread through the art market that there was something up at Christie's. Soon everyone in the trade was haunting the Hill and sniffing the air, each desperately trying to look at the painting without being caught looking at the painting. Indulging in a price-piquing little auction-house charade, Christie's directors twice escorted London's National Gallery director, Sir Philip Hendy, past the painting, slyly watched his reaction. Said one later: "He just sat tight like Brer Rabbit and said nuffin'." Hendy was thinking plenty, though. During a silverware sale, a red baize...