It’s a thrifter’s dream: buy a small painting for $4, find out it's incredibly rare, and come out on the other side of an auction with over $100,000. That is what happened to Tracy Donahue, a New Hampshire resident who became famous in 2017 for finding a work by American painter and illustrator N. C. Wyeth at a thrift store.
Art News
One of Napoleon Bonaparte's black bicorne hats sold at an auction in Fontainebleau, France for €1.9 million ($2.1 million), and is among just 20 others that are said to exist.
Paris’s Louvre Museum is looking for donations in its bid to acquire a still life of strawberries by French painter Jean Siméon Chardin, which was bought by the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas at an Artcurial auction in March 2022 for a record-breaking €24.4 million ($26.8 million).
See highlights from the Bonhams sale of the estate of journalist Barbara Walters.
Here are 9 highlights from the New York fall sales at Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Phillips, which are among the most important secondary market art sales in America.
In a groundbreaking moment for the art world, Ethiopian-American artist Julie Mehretu's large-scale work, Untitled, 2001, set a new record for an African-born artist when it sold for $9.32 million at Sotheby's Hong Kong.
This fall, over one hundred works from the collection of art patron Emily Fisher Landau will come to auction at Sotheby’s where they are estimated to bring in over $400 million.
Sotheby's is set to present Bibliotheca Brookeriana, the sale of the book collection of T. Kimball Brooker, featuring over 1,300 sixteenth century French and Italian books, which is estimated to bring in over $25 million.
In a groundbreaking move that promises to reshape the art market landscape, Phillips has announced a new platform, Dropshop, that will offer limited edition releases of artworks in direct partnerships with the artists themselves who will also get a percentage of the resale price.
Over four hundred years ago, Peter Paul Rubens painted a bloody, yet tender biblical scene of Saint Sebastian being tended to by two angels. But the painting’s ownership history and its frequent change of hands in the eighteenth century led to its eventual loss of all provenance and therefore loss of the artist of this work’s identity for three hundred years.
