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Auction Previews & News

3 Results
  • Norman-Parkinson-Audrey-Hepburn-Italy-1955-s
    Auction Industry, Opinion
    Has Instagram Changed Art Buying?

    Brett Gorvy, Christie’s former global head of contemporary art, posted a picture of a Jean-Michel Basquiat painting on his personal Instagram page in 2017. Within hours, he received messages from collectors around the world who were interested in buying the piece. The painting was sold for $24 million two days later. Speaking with the New York Times, Gorvy stated, “From the buyer’s point of view, this was a total Instagram sale.”  Instagram boasts over a billion users monthly, and current estimates suggest that over 50 billion photos have been shared to date. Artists, galleries, and auction houses are increasingly using social media platforms like Instagram to share, market, and sell art. Auction houses see viral hashtags and eye-catching photos as an opportunity to draw bidders toward their upcoming sales. Sotheby’s, for example, celebrated one million Instagram followers in 2019. The auction house even compiles a list of its best Instagram posts at the end of each year.  Posted on Sotheby’s Instagram page to promote the upcoming “Made in Britain” auction on March 17, 2020. Image by Sotheby’s. Buying and selling art is adapting to the digital space. Beyond the increasing growth of online auction sales (rising over 11% yearly since 2013), initiatives such as See You Next Thursday (SYNT) have changed the accessibility of art buying. The SYNT account posts images of at least one piece of art on Thursday evenings, allowing interested buyers to bid simply by leaving Instagram comments. Founder Calli Moore shared her vision for the account with Artsy last year: “[SYNT is] very geared toward artists who have a very large outreach, but are not represented [in galleries].” An example of Ashley Longshore’s work, which gathered more than 10,000 likes on Instagram. Image by Ashley Longshore. Independent artists are also using Instagram for self-promotion. Ashley Longshore is one artist who harnesses the power of social media to market her work. She reported to Vogue: “Technology is the platform of my business: All I need is my iPad, my Instagram, and a delivery truck.” Nearly 300,000 users follow Longshore, receiving regular updates about new work and merchandise…

    AuctionDaily
  • Press Release
    Rediscovered Painting Attributed to Caravaggio Estimated to Sell for $171 M., Could Shatter Records

    Caravaggio’s Judith and Holofernes (1607) being revealed at a press conference in London.ANDY RAIN/EPA-EFE/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK At a press conference on Thursday held at London’s Colnaghi gallery, French dealer Marc Labarbe said he will auction off the recently rediscovered painting Judith and Holofernes (ca. 1607). CNN, which first reported the news, said that the canvas has been given a €150 million (about $171 million) estimate. According to Labarbe, the artist who made the work is the Italian painter Caravaggio, though some experts have cast doubt on the attribution. If the painting sells for anything close to its estimate at the sale, which is scheduled for June 27 at Labarbe’s auction gallery in Toulouse, France, it will blow past Caravaggio’s auction record of $145,000, which was set at a Sotheby’s New York sale in 1998. Caravaggio’s painting Boy Peeling a Fruit, which some have said may have been the artist’s first canvas, was originally expected to shatter that record in 2015, when it was given a $5 million estimate at Christie’s Old Masters auction, but it failed to find a buyer. Judith and Holofernes was rediscovered in 2014, in an attic in the Toulouse home of one of Labarbe’s friends. Some have said the work is the second version of one of Caravaggio’s masterpieces, a scene showing the Biblical tale of Judith decapitating the Assyrian general Holofernes, which is now owned by the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica in Rome. A few historians have regarded the work’s attribution with suspicion. In 2016 the French culture ministry said the work was “a very important Caravaggio marker, whose history and attribution are to be fully investigated.” The country’s government decided not to acquire the work and lifted a ban that allowed it to travel beyond France in 2016. That same year, two experts told the New York Times that it was possible the painting was a copy by Louis Finson, a Flemish artist who was known as a Caravaggisti because his art took its cues from the Italian painter. In a statement, Eric Turquin, a consultant who works with Marc Labarbe, said, “Forgotten in the loft of a house in the Toulouse area, probably for more than 150…

    Art News
  • Press Release
    Disputing the Origins of Four-Legged Treasures

    New York and Boston butt heads over more than sports teams: Try 18th-century walnut chairs whose origins are at the center of a controversy. The chairs, unsigned pieces with shell carvings on their knees and backs, descended in wealthy New York families including the Apthorps and Van Cortlandts. Some scholars believe they were made in New York; others have asserted that Boston cabinetmakers produced them. The dispute has inspired “Boston or New York: Revisiting the Apthorp Family and Related Sets of Queen Anne Chairs,” an exhibition of about 20 works that opens Jan. 20 at the Bernard & S. Dean Levy gallery in Manhattan. “The field should be big enough for two interpretations,” Philip D. Zimmerman, a curator of the show, said in an interview. His own team questions the findings of Americana experts including Leigh Keno and Alan Miller, who, in scholarly journal articles about 15 years ago, attributed the chairs to Boston carvers. Those articles in turn had disagreed with longstanding scholarship attributing the chairs to New York makers. The Keno and Miller camp points to 18th-century archival records that detail luxury goods made in Boston and shipped to New York. Mr. Zimmerman argues that the documents do not necessarily represent chairs as lavish as the pieces inherited by Apthorps and Van Cortlandts. An 18th-century chair that belonged to a New York family.Credit...Bernard & S. Dean Levy Inc. Each side also points to arcane details of furniture making, describing particular chair foot forms, seams and brackets as signs of quintessentially Bostonian or New York craftsmanship. Mr. Miller, in an interview, described the Levy show as “a reactionary, outmoded, retrogressive idea that ignores evidence.” Mr. Keno was similarly skeptical but added, “Anytime that people can get excited and re-examine a group of 18th-century furniture, it’s a great thing.” Descendants of original owners have weighed in, too. “My family would never buy anything from Boston; maybe Newport, if we had to,” a Van Cortlandt relative told the Levy gallery owners, in support of the New York workshop theory. Crucial evidence was lost, however, in fires in the 1770s and 1830s that destroyed…

    The New York Times