Word: goghs
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...couple. But last summer, as husband and wife cleared away a lifetime of domestic clutter, they called in an auctioneer's agent. His discovery, disclosed last week: the seemingly undistinguished still life was something any avid art collector would give his left ear to own -- a genuine Vincent van Gogh...
...painting, signed with a solitary V, is apparently a work that Van Gogh painted in Paris in 1886. By 1930 it belonged to a Swiss banker, and it was later bequeathed to his Milwaukee relatives. When Chicago's Leslie Hindman auction house puts the painting on the block in March, the obscure work could fetch as much as $800,000. Its discovery has sent fortune hunters rummaging through their attics, hoping to strike oils...
PAINTINGS IN THE HERMITAGE by Colin Eisler (Stewart, Tabori & Chang; $85). Catherine the Great started it. She acquired important paintings, and her collection became the nucleus of the Leningrad museum. Velasquez, Rubens, Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Picasso: no visitor has seen all that is pictured here; the book itself amounts to a work...
...Scared by the descent of the Nikkei stock index, the Japanese -- who in 1988 accounted for more than half the total recorded sales volume of all art bought at auction worldwide -- bid sluggishly or sat on their hands. The Japanese buyers did not even come out for a Van Gogh still life that was expected to make $12 million to $16 million at Christie's Impressionist and modern sale two weeks ago. It too was bought in, at $9.5 million. However, a fine Van Gogh ink sketch was bought by a New York dealer for $8.4 million, the highest price...
Overall, the sales cast further doubt on auction-house techniques. Sotheby's all but ceased lending money to buyers after it was so badly burned by Alan Bond's default on Van Gogh's Irises, bought but not paid for in 1987 for $53.9 million with the help of a $27 million loan from the auction house. But this fall's victim has been the equally controversial system of guarantees, a product of the fierce competition between Sotheby's and Christie's, whereby the auction house contracts to pay the seller a given price for artworks -- whatever the outcome...