Word: one
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...should one suppose that these are dreaming connoisseurs who have just relinquished the ink block and the brush to dabble in the art of the namban, or round-eyed barbarian. Shigeki Kameyama, representing the Mountain Tortoise Gallery in Tokyo, last week bought, among other things, Picasso's The Mirror at $26.4 million. The week before, he had also purchased De Kooning's Interchange at $20.68 million and a Brice Marden drawing at $500,000 at Sotheby's. Kameyama is known to other dealers as "Oddjob," after Goldfinger's hat-flinging chauffeur...
Aska International, the Tokyo art gallery that spent $25 million at the Dorrance sale, is controlled by Aichi Corp., a Tokyo firm that last September became one of the five largest shareholders of Christie's stock, with 6.4%. Aichi, in turn, is controlled by Yasumichi Morishita, a secretive businessman who got a one-year suspended sentence in Tokyo in 1986 for securities fraud. Morishita is reputedly worth a trillion yen ($7 billion), and may be planning a takeover of Christie's -- although it is unlikely that the Monopolies and Mergers Commission would approve...
...unsophisticated -- they buy names, not pictures -- but this will inevitably change. (It did in America, after 1890, while Europe was laughing.) The Tokyo market still has a weakness for yucky little Renoirs and third-string Ecole de Paris painters like Moise Kisling, whom nobody wanted a few years ago; one Japanese collector is the proud owner of a thousand paintings by Bernard Buffet. But the Japanese started going after bigger game about five years ago, and already the outflow is immense. Contemporary art has become, quite simply, currency. The market burns off all nuances of meaning, and has begun...
Some museums, however, have continued to make remarkable purchases. The Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, under the direction of Edmund Pillsbury, is a leader here (as New Yorkers can currently see from a loan show of its holdings at the Frick Collection). At least one museum, the Getty in Malibu, Calif., with its $3.5 billion endowment and almost limitless spending power, seems unaffected by the rise in price. In May it was able to buy Pontormo's Portrait of a Halberdier at Christie's for $35 million and last week Manet's acridly ironic view of a flag-bedecked...
...One recourse for some museums is to raise funds by selling work from their permanent collections, as MOMA recently did. In order to purchase an indubitable masterpiece, Van Gogh's Portrait of the Postmaster Roulin, for an undisclosed price, the museum sold and exchanged seven paintings. But this encourages museum trustees to think of the permanent collection as an impermanent one, a kind of stock portfolio that can be traded at will: not a good omen...