Word: sales
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Guarantees can backfire. Sotheby's guarantee on the recent four-day sale of the collection of John T. Dorrance Jr., the late Campbell's soup heir, nearly did so. According to ARTnewsletter, a trade sheet, the dealer William Acquavella offered the Dorrance estate a guarantee of $100 million, but Sotheby's trumped him with $110 million. Though the sale realized a total of $131.29 million, it did so only because Sotheby's had persuaded the heirs to accept a "global reserve" (the minimum price acceptable to the seller on the whole collection), instead of placing a reserve, or minimum...
...what became the most expensive painting of all time, Van Gogh's Irises. But Sotheby's defends its policy as right, proper and indeed inevitable. Guarantees are given "very sparingly," CEO Ainslie said last week. "It is unusual for more than one or two paintings in a sale to be guaranteed." Ainslie rejects any comparison to margin trading. "We do not make it a standard policy to loan 50% against anything. We are not just lending against the object, but to an individual. At the time we loaned to Mr. Bond, he was viewed very differently from...
...loans. The current consumer affairs code says that "if an auctioneer makes loans or advances money to consignors and/or prospective purchasers, this fact must be conspicuously disclosed in the auctioneer's catalog." But did this mean that Sotheby's put a note in the catalog of its November 1987 sale saying it had given one Alan Bond a loan of half the hammer price, repayment terms to be negotiated, on Irises? Think again...
...forgery today is the work of the Russian avant-garde -- Rodchenko, Popova, Larionov, Lissitsky, Malevich -- which, as a result of perestroika, is coming on the market in some quantity after 60 years of Stalinist-Brezhnevian repression. Prices are zooming, and authentication is thin. Sotheby's held a Russian sale in London in April 1989. It contained, according to some scholars, two outright fakes ascribed to Liubov Popova and one dubious picture, badly restored and signed on the front -- something Popova never did with her oil paintings. Doubts about the authenticity of these works were voiced to the auction house...
...There he underbid the $20.68 million De Kooning and bought, among other things, a Johns for $12.1 million. "I thought Saatchi had good intentions," Scully says. "Now it turns out that he's only a superdealer. These guys create price levels for themselves. They put one painting in a sale and bid it up to huge levels. And the artist loses control of his work, while his relations with the dealer he has worked with so long go for nothing, absolutely nothing. We are just pawns...