Word: bernet
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...auction in Manhattan's Parke-Bernet Galleries seven years ago, Showman Billy Rose thought that a Frans Hals painting was his for $20,000. But from the auctioneer's pulpitlike rostrum, Parke-Bernet's President Hiram H. Parke sedately cajoled more bids. "What's the matter," called Rose, "you got a stiff arm?" Not until the price had risen another $10,000 did Parke's arm loosen up enough to bring down the hammer and sell the painting to Rose...
With such genteel stiff-arming of the buyer, white-haired Hiram Parke, 76, who looks more like a bank president than an auctioneer, has pleased most of the sellers who have come to him.* In eleven years he has built Parke-Bernet (rhymes with "in debt") into the largest U.S. auction house, lured buyers from as far away as Europe and South America, and sold more than $50 million worth of paintings, books, furniture, tapestries, etc. At commissions ranging from 10% (plus expenses) up to 20%, he has always shown a tidy profit (last year's take: about...
Last week 71-year-old Frank Crowninshield, the dapper, white-haired fine arts editor of Vogue, who once wrote an article entitled "Ten Thousand Nights in a Dinner Coat," sold at auction his influential collection of modern, mostly French art. The 1019 items offered at Manhattan's Parke-Bernet Galleries put a total of $181,747 into "Crownie's" elegantly tailored pocket and the event itself had the quality of social luster, with a note of high gaga, which he dearly loves...
...Parke-Bernet Galleries, fabulously wealthy Belgian Baron Cassel van Doom stumped pompously to every important sale, solemnly focused a pair of high-powered binoculars on everything that reached the auction block. At Gimbels 84-year-old Spanish Millionaire José Lazaro Galdeano, his loud necktie half hidden by a grey spade beard, bought right & left, walked off with one of the season's most expensive buys ($26,742): François Boucher's L'Amour, reputedly posed by Mme. de Pompadour...
Season's biggest sale at Parke-Bernet was 18th-Century British Painter John Hoppner's Portrait of Miss Frances Beresjord (see cut), bought for $39,000 by the famous art-dealing firm of Duveen's. It was lavishly topped, however, by the season's record high ($175,000), for Renoir's Mussel Fishers at Berneval (one of the two highest-priced Renoirs in existence). The buyer: Merion, Pa.'s terrible-tempered Dr. Albert C. Barnes...