Word: sales
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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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...
Irises was owned by John Whitney Payson, who had lent it to a small university museum in Maine. But with the news of Sunflowers' sale for $39.9 million -- and with little tax relief in sight if he gave it to a museum -- he decided to sell it through Sotheby's, which cautiously predicted a price between $20 million and $40 million and went to tell Bond the glad news. Sotheby's did not need to cast a delicate fly over Bond and strip it softly in. The fish was already halfway over the gunwale and champing eagerly...
Irises, it seemed at the time, was the picture that saved the art market after Black Monday -- Oct. 19, 1987 -- when Wall Street plunged 508 points. Actually, the market was running quite high between the crash and the sale of Irises, but the painting was greeted as a talisman. Bond beefed up the security arrangements on the top floor of his headquarters in Perth to fortress strength and unveiled his acquisition -- the only Van Gogh in Australia -- to the press. "This isn't just a great painting!" he exulted to the cameras. "It's the greatest painting in the world...
...auction house had no choice. It had punctually paid John Payson the full sale amount, $49 million, and now the exposure of the buyer's inability to pay for the painting would have been horrendous. Although the firm could have repossessed Irises and put it on the block again, such a move would almost certainly have been a disaster. It might have brought $30 million, maybe $35 million, according to informed sources -- a fire sale. And the results for the art market if the World's Most Expensive Picture lost a third of its value in a year...
...company. How much has been repaid? Sotheby's won't say; a spokesman for Dallhold soothingly announced that "all is in order" and only "10% to 25% of the picture price" (between $5.4 million and $13 million) remained to be paid. The balance would be satisfied by the sale of Bond's Manet, La Promenade, at Sotheby's last week...