Word: goghs
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...remembered as the moment when the art-auction frenzy of the late 1980s began its decline. In the big sales in New York City over the past two weeks, despite freakish prices for two great paintings, the auction market was showing ominous signs of instability. For Van Gogh and Renoir, in Japan, there was no ceiling. For other artists, including some highly promoted contemporary ones, the floor was shaky...
...Tuesday night at Christie's, Van Gogh's melancholy portrait of his physician, Dr. Gachet, sold to the Japanese dealer Hideto Kobayashi for $82.5 million, the highest price ever paid at auction for a work of art. Kobayashi bought the painting on behalf of noted Japanese collector Ryoei Saito, a paper-manufacturing executive. Two nights later, at Sotheby's, Kobayashi again acted for Saito in bidding $78.1 million for one of the best Renoirs in America, Au Moulin de la Galette...
...tsubame (swallow) did not make this spring. Twelve of the 70 works in the Sotheby's sale failed to reach their reserves and went unsold. On the night of the Van Gogh sale at Christie's, a Manet, The Bench, made only $16.5 million -- not chickenfeed, but still a disappointment considering Christie's presale estimate of $20 million to $25 million. In addition, an exceptional 1925 Mondrian made $8.8 million; Christie's estimate had been $12 million to $16 million...
...high end of the market, driven by Japanese fixations on Renoir and Van Gogh, had ceased to pull the rest. A week earlier, Sotheby's contemporary auction was a flop, with overall sales totaling little more than $55 million against estimates of about $86 million to more than $112 million. The prices of "name" artists, from Willem de Kooning to Eric Fischl and Jean-Michel Basquiat, were humiliatingly trounced, although a few -- Cy Twombly, Richard Diebenkorn -- saw new levels set for their work...
...that the auction houses had placed vastly inflated reserves, or minimum acceptable bids, on their paintings. Says Richard Feigen, an international art dealer: "Their estimates and reserves are now insane, sometimes double what the market will bear." Prices for older masterpieces are expected to hold up well. Van Gogh's Portrait of Dr. Gachet should bring more than $40 million at auction this week. Other safe bets: 20th century classics (Picasso, Matisse) and postwar Americans (Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko). But experts think prices will soften dramatically for paintings by some young superstars (David Salle, Eric Fischl, Anselm Kiefer). Says Feigen...