Dealers Eskenazi Secure Tang Ewer at Sotheby’s

Modelled in the form of a Sasanian metal ewer and applied with Hellenistic-inspired decoration, the 14½in (37cm) high piece sold well above its £40,000-60,000 guide to London dealers Eskenazi for £2.3m at Sotheby's on May 13.

It had been consigned by a private Japanese collector and bore a label for the early 20th century collection of Paris-based Chinese art dealer L Wannieck.

Sotheby's also secured a bid of £3.3m from the Asian trade for a 5½in (14cm) Xuande blue and white facetted vase during the sell-out single-owner sale of Tokyo collector Tsuneichi Inoue.

The price was the highest of the series as ATG went to press, with a further sale at Christie's still to go. 

A longer report on the Asian art series of auctions will appear in a future issue of ATG's printed weekly publication.

Source: Antiquestradegazette.com

Christie’s billion dollar week of sales as Contemporary art market inflates further

Added to the $705.85m (£455.4m) generated by their Looking Forward to the Past auction on Monday, the result meant Christie's could trumpet the fact that they had staged the world's first billion dollar art week.

The company's international head of post-war and Contemporary art Brett Gorvy commented after the sale that buyers "were willing to stretch and stretch some more to have the best."

The 82-lot sale achieved a sell-through rate of 88% with 72 works finding buyers on the night. No fewer than 49 lots had guaranteed prices financed either directly by the auctioneers or via a third party.

The top lot was one such work - Mark Rothko's (1903-1970) No. 10 from 1958 which the owner had bought from The Pace Gallery, New York in1986. It came to auction with an unpublished estimate but seven bidders chased it over the $50m mark before it was knocked down at $73m (£49.3m) to an anonymous buyer bidding through Brett Gorvy on the phone.

The earthy colours and size of the oil on canvas made it a more challenging work within the artist's oeuvre. But, dating from the year that Rothko began his Seagram Murals where the artist explored new forms and colour harmonies, the 7ft 10in x 5ft 9in (2.39m x 1.76m) oil on canvas was deemed a more contemplative piece of abstraction than  Untitled (Yellow and Blue) from 1954 that led Sotheby's sale of Contemporary art in New York the night before.

Freud's Nude

Elsewhere at Christie's, a record came for Lucian Freud (1922-2011) when Benefits Supervisor Resting sold at a top-estimate $50m (£33.8m). It was knocked down in the room to London dealer Pilar Ordovas who was bidding for a client and saw off competition from three phones.

Estimated at $30m-50m, the vendor had bought it from New York dealers Acquavella in 1995 and it was another lot with a guaranteed minimum price.

The 4ft 11in x 5ft 4in (1.51 x 1.61m) oil on canvas from 1994 depicted Freud's model Sue Tilley and it exceeded $30m (£16.1m) paid for another nude painting of the same subject at Christie's New York in May 2008 which was reportedly purchased by Roman Abramovich.

The flagship fortnight of auctions in the Big Apple continues tonight with Christie's sale of Impressionist & Modern art.

The buyer's premium at Christie's New York was 25/20/12%.

£1 = $1.48

Source : Antiquestradegazette.com

Antique Trader producing consignment guide

Antique Trader announces it will be producing an auction consignment guide and directory, which will be published in the July 22 edition of Antique Trader magazine. It will be available at no additional cost to magazine subscribers, and also available to the public as a low-cost digital download.

Categorized by state, the directory will include auction houses from across the United States, but will also include information from some auction companies in the UK, Europe and Canada. The consignment directory will be comprised of not only auction house names, locations and telephone numbers, but also the names and contact email addresses and telephone numbers of consignment directors. Also included will be frequently asked questions regarding the auction consignment process, which will be answered by auction house consignment directors.

“Each week we are contacted by people who are wondering how to sell specific items,” said Karen Knapstein, print editor of Antique Trader. “They don’t know where to start; this directory should give those people who aren’t comfortable with selling items on their own a starting point.”

All auction houses, regardless of size or location, are invited to include their company information in the guide free of charge as long as there is a specific person who can be reached for consignment information. Companies with multiple consignment directors are invited to list each director with their specialty area and contact information.

“I’m really excited about this project,” Knapstein continues. “It’s going to help both auction houses and potential consignors. Auction houses will get their names and services available into the hands of the people who need those services the most.”

Limited specialty advertisement placements are also available. Those auction companies that would like to place consignment ads in the directory should contact sales representative Nick Ockwig at 715-318-4505 or nick.ockwig@fwcommunity.com for availability and rates.

The Consignment Directory Form is available to download here: http://media2.fwpublications.com/ATR/ConsignmentForm.pdf. Auction houses that would like to be included should submit the completed Consignment Directory Submission Form to Antique Trader by midnight, June 25, 2015. Submission information can be emailed to ATNews@fwcommunity.com (Subject Line: Antique Trader Consignment Directory). Submission forms can also be mailed to: AT Consignment Guide, C/O Antique Trader Editors, 700 E. State St., Iola, WI 54990.

Source: Antiquetrader.com

Auction record: Picasso for $179m

To a medley of whoops, hollers and gasps on Monday night, Pablo Picasso's 1955 painting `Les Femmes d'Alger (Version `O')' sold for $179.4 million including fees at Christie's `Looking Forward to the Past' sale of artworks spanning the 20th century . The price was the highest on record for a work of art sold at auction, the company said, and was well over its estimate of $140 million.

Once the bidding reached $120 million, the Picasso was pursued by five clients on telephones, often in agonizingly slow, $1million increments, before finally being sold to a buyer represented by Brett Gorvy , Christie's international head of contemporary art.

The previous all-time auction high, also at Christie's, had been the $142.4 million paid by Elaine Wynn, co-founder of the Wynn casino empire, for Francis Bacon's `Three Studies of Lucian Freud' in November 2013.“It's incredibly difficult to find big, A-plus-quality Picassos fresh to the market,“ said the Paris-based dealer Thomas Bompard. “It's a price for a unique thing. You can't replace a painting like that.“

Less than 30 minutes after the Picasso sale, Alberto Giacometti's gaunt bronze sculpture, `L'homme au doigt (Pointing Man)' sold for $126 million, or $141.3 million with fees, an auction high for any sculpture. It was the first time that two works estimated at over $120 million each were for sale at the same auction. Picasso's `Les Femmes d'Alger (Version `O')' is the most opulent and imposing of a series of paintings that the Spanish-born artist produced from 1954 to 1955 in response to Eugène Delacroix's 1834 Orientalist masterpiece, `Women of Algiers'. It had last been on the market in November 1997, when it sold for $31.9 million at a Christie's auction of works owned by the Ameri can collectors, Victor and Sally Ganz. It was bought at that auction by a Saudi collector and kept in a house in London, said two dealers with knowledge of the matter, who declined to be named because of concerns over confidentiality .Monday night's seller, who was not identified, had been guaranteed a minimum price by Christie's, which estimated the work would fetch about $140 million.

The Swiss-born sculptor Giacometti is renowned for his hauntingly emaciated figures made in postwar Paris when Europe was in the grip of Existentialist angst. He became one of the art market's ultimate trophy names in February 2010 after the billionaire Lily Safra paid £65 million (then $103.4 million) for the 1961 bronze, `Walking Man I', at a Sotheby's auction in London. `Pointing Man', a 5foot-high bronze figure by Alberto Giacometti depicting a skinny man with extended arms, has been in the same private collection for 45 years.

“Pointing Man,“ an earlier, hand-painted bronze from 1947-51, is regarded by many as more compelling. Made in an edition of six, plus an artist's proof, it had been acquired from the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York in 1970.

Christie's anonymous seller has been identified as the New York real estate magnate Sheldon Solow, according to artinfo.com. The Giacometti had been estimated to sell for $130 million and did not carry any financial guarantees. A less obviously commercial lot than the Picasso, it attracted just two telephone bidders.

Source: The Times Of India

Sweet scent for best of 18th century France

The pair formed part of a 250-lot collection of 18th century decorative arts removed from a town house in central London.

The Japanese bowls and covers, one decorated with phoenix, the other with dragons, were thought to date to the mid 18th century. They were united at some point in the 1760s or '70s by Louis-Marie-Augustin, 5th Duc d'Aumont (1709-82). The phoenix vessel was acquired from Jean de Jullienne, who had been director of the Gobelins tapesty factory. The celebrated bronzier Pierre Gouthière was then commissioned to add neoclassical gilt-bronze mounts to both.

Royal Provenance

After his death in 1792, the brûle parfums and other pieces from d'Aumont's collection were bought by the dealer Philippe-François Julliot on behalf of Louis XVI, with the intention of installing them in the museum planned for the Louvre. The king was executed the following year and by 1795, as revolution raged, the perfume burners were recorded in the inventory from the Depot de Nesle - a central warehouse established and run by the republican government to reorganise cultural properties. They passed through several more hands and later entered the collection of La Comtesse D'Aubigny, who sold them at Christie's London in July 1976 for £4000.

As proof that the finery of the ancien regime still carries clout in the market, four bidders in the room and on the phone at Sotheby's on April 29 took the price well above the £150,000-250,000 estimate before they were eventually hammered down to a private collector on the phone.

The buyer's premium was 25/20/12%.

Written by Gabriel Berner

Source: Antiquestradegazette.com

Soldani bronze brings £320,000

 

 This Italian baroque bronze depicting ‘Ganymede and the Eagle’ by Massimiliano Soldani-Benzi (1656-1740) proved the highlight of Lyon & Turnbull’s recent sale in Edinburgh.

It sold for £320,000 (plus premium).

Soldani was Master of the Mint in Florence but, as perhaps the finest bronze caster in Europe in the late 1600s, extended his range well beyond the coinage of Tuscany. His workshop, conveniently situated opposite the entrance to the Uffizi Gallery, attracted the British 'Milordi' with Lord Burlington among the well-heeled English gentlemen who commissioned bronzes to be made from terracotta models.

This statuette - with an Anglo-Irish provenance through the family of the late Countess of Lanesborough that might take it as far back as 1716 - may well be one of them.

Dr Charles Avery, former deputy keeper of sculpture at the V&A, who catalogued the piece, speculated it was purchased with its pair depicting Leda and the Swan (now missing) by the Countess's descendant Theophilus Butler (c.1669-1723) probably from Soldani's representative GG Zamboni in London. Butler represented County Cavan and Belturbet in the Irish House of Commons.

Fitzwilliam Model

The only other version of this 15in (38cm) model is in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, who also own a version of Leda and the Swan. L&T were able to compare the two side-by-side during cataloguing.

L&T furniture and work of art specialist Douglas Girtin told ATG the bronze had been overlooked by the family but was spotted as an item of some significance during a routine valuation in November. The intervening six months allowed the auctioneers to nail down the attribution and promote the bronze properly.

Estimated at £100,000-150,000, it attracted five phone bidders (three from continental Europe and one from the US) plus two bidders in the room. Mr Girtin said it sold to "a well-known UK dealer".

The sale took place on April 22 and the buyer's premium was 25/20%.

Source: Aantiquestradegazette.com

Come For The Cookies, Stay For The Real Antiques

www.chorrbazaar.com RUSHVILLE, Ind. — On March 3, 15 years ago, Elizabeth Innis stepped out and took a big chance in this downtown small county seat (pop. 6,341), amid the cornfields of East Central Indiana. On a credit card, an abundance of confidence and a wealth of talents, Innis opened the doors to Elizabeth’s Keepsakes. It was a landmark for not only Rushville, but for Innis. To celebrate her 15th anniversary, celebrated during the first weekend in March, the store will offer 15 percent discounts on its antiques, plus have cake, refreshments and a special drawing for its customers. The past 15 years have gone quickly, Innis says. However, in her matchless manner, word of her shop is becoming known far and wide. “My daughter and I were on one of our back-road antiquing trips … I think we were somewhere in Tennessee,” she recalls. “We were in a shop, way back off the road, and I was talking with the lady there. I asked her if she accepted tax exempt options for dealers. She kept asking me where my shop was … I told her you would never know where it is. Once I explained where we were located, she said, ’you mean that shop that smells so good (scented candles).’ And I couldn’t believe she had been at our shop; she didn’t remember the name, but she remembered how nice it smelled … I won’t stand for any mustiness or clutter in my shop.” As a “military brat,” Innis has traveled throughout the world. She has lived in Japan, Hawaii, South Dakota and California and traveled extensively throughout Europe. The Midwest was a novelty. Unlike many antique shop owners, Innis didn’t grow up in an antique environment. “We moved every two years,” she says. “It was pick up, throw everything away and travel to the next base. Antiques were not a part of my life, but I was always attracted to them.” During those early years, in San Diego, she began to dabble in antiques, first opening a small booth and later becoming a manager of Granny’s Antiques. “I’ve always been curious; I like to learn. My father taught us early on not to be afraid of stepping out there and doing something different. I was taught not to be afraid.” With typical determination, she turned Elizabeth’s Keepsakes into one of the premiere antique and collectibles shop in the Midwest. Her secret? “You’ve got to love your customers,” she says. A good majority of her clientele are repeat customers. The mother of four grown children (two daughters and twin sons), Innis is a natural “people person,” always prepared with a smile and quip.It also doesn’t hurt, being an expert baker and cook. She arrives early in the store each morning; to bake and prepare the sandwiches and soup she serves to eager customers every day. After establishing her roots in Indiana 15 years ago, she bakes an Indiana sugar cream pie as befits any true Hoosier. During the summer, her lemon cookies and lemon bars are, in themselves, worth the drive to her keepsake enterprise. The 5,000-square-foot store is composed of 10 local vendors who keep a broad variety of antiques and collectibles on hand, from Victorian and primitive furniture and furnishings, old crocks and pitchers, vintage clothing, old wooden-handled kitchen items and more. Although interspersed throughout the store are new “primitive” wares, Innis said “a good two-thirds” of her shop is devoted to antiques. Elizabeth’s Keepsakes is located on Indiana State Road 3 in downtown Rushville, at 237 N. Main St.

Source: Antiqueweek.com