Leonardo da Vinci Painting Sells for $450 Million At Auction The Painting This At disappeared Is Now Found
Last
Year Patcnews -TV The Patriot Conservative News Tea Party Network
Reported The World's Most expensive painting ever sold at auction was
stolen Last Year Now It's Been Found and arrived at New Orleans
Louisiana So How did it wined-up-here ? I wish this painting would talk and found out How a $450 Million da Vinci Was Lost in America—and Later Found
Louisiana family discovers that ‘Salvator Mundi’ painting had long hung
in their home before it was reauthenticated as a Leonardo masterpiece
took a very long Journey This Painting was missing over a Year ago now
found, The World of Painters would still how the painting end up in New
Orleans Louisiana, The Art dealer Robert Simon and his colleague Alexander Parrish bought a painting by an unknown artist in 2005.
Simon then asked his friend Dianne Modestini to restore it. Her work on
the piece eventually led to the discovery that it was Leonardo da
Vinci's "Salvator Mundi," and helped her through one of the hardest
times in her life.
The Wall Street Journal By Denise Blostein, Robert Libetti and Kelly Crow Sept. 18, 2018 5:19 p.m. ET
Leonardo da Vinci’s rediscovered painting of Christ as the world’s
savior, “Salvator Mundi”—auctioned last year for a record-setting $450.3
million—has been owned by British kings and Russian oligarchs. But
until now no one knew much about the nearly half-century it spent lost
in obscurity in the U.S. Fresh details have emerged about the da
Vinci’s whereabouts and the unsuspecting Louisiana family who lived with
the painting for decades before a pair of Old Master dealers bought it
from their patriarch’s estate sale in New Orleans. More than 27,000
people lined up to see Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘Salvator Mundi’ during
Christie’s world-wide tour of the painting last fall. How a $450 Million da Vinci Was Lost and Later Found Long-lost da Vinci painting fetches $450.3 million, an auction record for art Leonardo da Vinci’s painting of Jesus Christ, “Saviour of the World,”
sold for $450,312,500 on Nov. 15 at an auction in New York. (Reuters) By Travis M. Andrews and Fred Barbash November 16, 2017
Leonardo da Vinci’s painting, “Saviour of the World,” sold for
$450,312,500 Wednesday at auction, Christie’s said. The price, which
includes a buyer’s premium, makes it “the most expensive painting ever
sold at auction,” the auction house said in a statement. The
previous record for the most expensive painting sold at auction was
$179,364,992 for Picasso’s “Les Femmes d’Alger” (“Women of Algiers”),
according to Christie’s. The highest price previously paid at auction
for a da Vinci was in 2001 for his “Horse and Rider,” a work on paper,
which went for $11,481,865. The bidding for “Saviour of the
World,” (“Salvator Mundi“), coordinated out of Christie’s New York
office, lasted a little less than 20 minutes, with four and then just
two final bidders battling it out. The bidding, which was live-streamed,
moved rapidly, from the price guaranteed by Christie’s of $100 million
to about $330 million before long pauses set in, as many bidders dropped
out. ADVERTISEMENT
“Three thirty is bid and selling,” said auctioneer, Jussi Pylkkänen, Christie’s global president.
“Looking for another bid please,” he said. Noticing the continued phone
chatter of auction representatives with their clients, he stopped
briefly. “The conversation continues. So we will pause.”
At about $370 million there appeared to be only two remaining bidders on
the other end of the phone lines. Each were represented by Christie’s
specialists, Francois de Poortere and Alex Rotter. “Back to Francois’ clients at $370 million,” said Pylkkänen, as the room grew quiet Then came $400 million bid. “Francois is out,” said Pylkkänen. “Are you sure, Francois?” He then turned to Rotter. “It is with Alex Rotter at $400 . . . and the piece is sold,” said the auctioneer, to great applause. With the buyer’s premium, an extra fee tacked on by auction houses, the final tally came to $450,312,500. The identity of the winning bidder was not known.
“It is every auctioneer’s ambition to sell a Leonardo and likely the
only chance I will ever have,” said Pylkkänen. “It’s the pinnacle of my
career so far.” The price made the other lots sold Wednesday
night look paltry: A Warhol for more than $60 million; a Rothko for a
mere $32.3 million. But there are plenty of Andy Warhol paintings and
plenty of works by Mark Rothko. “Saviour of the World” is one of
some 16 known surviving paintings — including the “Mona Lisa” — by da
Vinci, the master of the Italian Renaissance. The others are scattered
throughout the world’s museums. Billed by the auction house as
“The Last da Vinci,” the painting spent centuries in obscurity until it
was rediscovered in 2005 and underwent a six-year restoration and
verification process. The small piece depicts Jesus raising his right
hand in blessing and holding a crystal orb, meant to represent the
world, in his left. ADVERTISING
Over time, the painting has attracted scrutiny and, inevitably, a lawsuit.
But in the weeks leading up to the auction, some 27,000 people,
including Leonardo DiCaprio, Alex Rodriguez, Patti Smith and Jennifer
Lopez, flooded into viewing halls in Hong Kong, London, San Francisco
and New York for a chance to glimpse the highly anticipated treasure.
Nina Doede was in awe when she saw the painting. “Standing in front of
that painting was a spiritual experience. It was breathtaking. It
brought tears to my eyes,” Doede, 65, told the New York Times and The
London Times At auction, the painting was guaranteed to sell for
at least $100 million, which meant the auction house would make up the
difference if went for less. Da Vinci painted it in the early
1500s, and it quickly inspired a number of imitations. Over the years,
art historians have identified about 20 of these copies, but the
original long seemed lost to history. At one point, it was part
of the royal collection of King Charles I of England. It disappeared in
1763 for nearly a century and a half. In 1900, Sir Charles Robinson
purchased the painting for the Cook Collection in London. But by then,
it was no longer credited to da Vinci but to his follower Bernardino
Luini. In 1958, the collection was auctioned off in pieces, with
“Salvator Mundi” going for a mere 45 pounds, which translates to about
$125 today, Today Show reported. Then it dropped off the grid for
another 50 years until resurfacing in Louisiana in 2005. There, for
$10,000, New York-based art collector and da Vinci expert Robert Simon
and art dealer Alexander Parish found and purchased it, the New Orleans
Advocate reported. At first glance, Simon thought it was just another copy of the famed painting.
“It was a very interesting painting but it’s not something I looked at
and thought, ‘Oh, my God, it must be a Leonardo,'” Simon told CNN. “The
whole idea that it might be by him was almost an impossibility; it’s
kind of a dream.” The piece was thick with overpaints, meaning
artists had added paint to the existing image over the years as a means
of either modernizing or improving it, probably to cover up chipped
areas in the original. Dianne Dwyer Modestini, a professor of
paintings conservation at New York University, set about carefully
restoring the portrait — which was still believed to be a copy — in
2007. She started chipping away at the varnish and overpaint obscuring
the original, the beginning of a process that would take six years. A strange feeling overtook her as she removed the first layer. For one thing, Jesus’ curly hair looked strikingly familiar.
“I was looking at the curls and St. John the Baptist at the Louvre, who
has this huge head of massive ringlets and they are exactly the same,”
Modestini told Today Show. It began dawning on her. The last da
Vinci painting discovered and verified was “Benois Madonna” or “Madonna
and Child with Flowers” in 1909. “My hands were shaking,” Modestini told Christie’s. “I went home and didn’t know if I was crazy.” A series of tests proved she wasn’t. One of the key pieces of evidence was found via X-ray, which revealed
what’s called a pentimento, a trace of an earlier painting beneath the
visible one. It showed that Jesus’ right thumb was originally positioned
slightly differently. But while working on the piece, da Vinci must
have changed his mind and painted over it — the thumb was moved to the
position in which it appears today. “If you’re making a copy of a
picture, there’s no way you’d do that,” British art critic Alastair
Sooke said in a video for Christie’s. “It wouldn’t make any sense.” That’s especially true when considering that “in all the copies of the
painting, [the finger] follows the finished position,” as Simon told
National Geographic. There were other clues as well, History.com
reported. It was painted on walnut in “many very thin layers of almost
translucent paint,” like other da Vinci pieces from the era. Infrared
light showed that the painter pressed his palm into the wet paint above
Jesus’ left eye to smudge the colors, a technique da Vinci favored
called sfumato blurring. In 2011, the art community reached a consensus: This was a bona fide da Vinci.
“It’s the most unimaginable discovery of the last 50 years,”
London-based art dealer Charles Beddington told the New York Times. “A
painting by Leonardo is one of the rarest things on the planet. You
can’t imagine it’s ever going to happen again.” Or, as Simon told Today Show, “This is not a little ripple in a pond, this is like a boulder,”
The painting made its public debut at London’s National Gallery in a
2011 exhibit titled, “Leonardo da Vinci: Painter in the Court of Milan,”
where it “became one of the most talked-about pictures in the world,”
as the New Yorker wrote. Not only that, but it was one of the more expensive paintings in the world. A consortium of dealers including Simon, Parish and Warren Adelson sold
the painting in 2013 for $80 million to a company owned by a Swiss
businessman and art dealer Yves Bouvier, Bloomberg reported.
Bouvier then flipped the painting the next year, selling it to Russian
billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev to the tune of $127.5 million — an almost
$50 million markup. Rybolovlev allegedly learned of the price
difference from the New York Times, prompting an ongoing legal battle
filled with suits and countersuits between Rybolovlev, Bouvier and
Sotheby’s, which was the intermediary in the original sale to Bouvier. The ongoing dispute has been dubbed “The Bouvier Affair.” After Wednesday’s sale, da Vinci’s “Saviour of the World” now joins a
rare club of paintings that recently sold for more than $100 million,
Artsy reported, including an untitled Jean-Michel Basquiat painting that
sold for $110.5 million in May, an Amedeo Modigliani nude that sold for
$170 million in 2015 and in 2013, and an Andy Warhol car crash painting
that sold for $105.4 million. Not everyone thinks the da Vinci is worth quite that much. “Even making allowances for its extremely poor state of preservation,
it is a curiously unimpressive composition and it is hard to believe
that Leonardo himself was responsible for anything so dull,” Charles
Hope, an emeritus professor at the Warburg Institute at the University
of London, wrote of the piece. The winning bidder did not agree. This story has been updated.
A Leonardo Da Vinci painting that sold
for a record $450 million at auction is heading to the new Louvre in Abu
Dhabi, according to the museum. The
painting, dubbed Salvator Mundi or Savior of the World, depicts Jesus
Christ. It was sold for $450.3 at auction, and the enormous price tag
makes it the highest auction price for any piece of art. Despite massive interest in the auction, mystery still surrounds who actually purchased the painting.
The New York Times reports
that it was purchased by Bader bin Abdullah bin Mohammed bin Farhan
al-Sau, a Saudi prince. USA TODAY has reached out to Christie's for
comment; meanwhile,
The
artwork was commissioned by Louis XII of France, but later disappeared.
It re-emerged in the 1950s, but was written off as a copy and sold
for £45 or $60, according to Today Show. It was later purchased by art dealers,
restored and eventually sold to Russian businessman Dmitry
Rybolovlev for $127.5 million.
The Louvre Abu Dhabi tweeted that the painting would be featured in the museum.
Leonardo da Vinci Painting Sells for $450.3 Million, Shattering Auction Highs
The last moments of the historic bidding war for Leonardo da Vinci’s “Salvator Mundi.”Published On CreditCreditImage by Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times After 19 minutes of dueling, with four
bidders on the telephone and one in the room, Leonardo da Vinci’s
“Salvator Mundi” sold on Wednesday night for $450.3 million with fees,
shattering the high for any work of art sold at auction. It far
surpassed Picasso’s “Women of Algiers,” which fetched $179.4 million at
Christie’s in May 2015. The buyer was not immediately disclosed.
There
were gasps throughout the sale, as the bids climbed by tens of millions
up to $225 million, by fives up to $260 million, and then by twos. As
the bidding slowed, and a buyer pondered the next multi-million-dollar
increment, Jussi Pylkkanen, the auctioneer, said, “It’s an historic
moment; we’ll wait.” Toward the end,
Alex Rotter, Christie’s co-chairman of postwar and contemporary art, who
represented a buyer on the phone, made two big jumps to shake off one
last rival bid from Francois de Poortere, Christie’s head of old master
paintings.
You
can’t put a price on beauty; you can put a price on a name. When the
National Gallery in London exhibited a painting of Christ in 2011 as a
heretofore lost work by Leonardo da Vinci, the surprise in art
historical circles was exceeded only by the salivating of dealers and
auctioneers.
The painting, “Salvator Mundi,” is the only Leonardo in private hands, and was brought to market by the family trust of Dmitry E. Rybolovlev,
the Russian billionaire entangled in an epic multinational lawsuit with
his former dealer, Yves Bouvier. On Wednesday night, at Christie’s
postwar and contemporary sale (in which it was incongruously included to
reach bidders beyond Renaissance connoisseurs), the Leonardo sold for a
shocking $450.3 million, the highest price ever paid for a work of art
at auction. Worth it? Well, what are you buying: the painting or the
brand?
The
painting, when purchased at an estate sale in 2005 for less than
$10,000, was initially considered a copy of a lost Leonardo, completed
around 1500 and once in the collection of Charles I of England. Over
time, its wood surface became cracked and chafed, and it had been
crudely overpainted, as an image in the sale catalog shows. Cleaned by
the conservator Dianne Dwyer Modestini,
the painting now appears in some limbo state between its original form
and an exacting, though partially imagined, rehabilitation.
A detail of the Leonardo da Vinci Painting. CreditBenjamin Norman for The New York Times.
You can’t put a
price on beauty; you can put a price on a name. When the National
Gallery in London exhibited a painting of Christ in 2011 as a heretofore
lost work by Leonardo da Vinci, the surprise in art historical circles
was exceeded only by the salivating of dealers and auctioneers.
The painting, “Salvator Mundi,” is the only Leonardo in private hands, and was brought to market by the family trust of Dmitry E. Rybolovlev,
the Russian billionaire entangled in an epic multinational lawsuit with
his former dealer, Yves Bouvier. On Wednesday night, at Christie’s
postwar and contemporary sale (in which it was incongruously included to
reach bidders beyond Renaissance connoisseurs), the Leonardo sold for a
shocking $450.3 million, the highest price ever paid for a work of art
at auction. Worth it? Well, what are you buying: the painting or the
brand?
The painting, when purchased at an estate sale in 2005 for less than
$10,000, was initially considered a copy of a lost Leonardo, completed
around 1500 and once in the collection of Charles I of England. Over
time, its wood surface became cracked and chafed, and it had been
crudely overpainted, as an image in the sale catalog shows. Cleaned by
the conservator Dianne Dwyer Modestini,
the painting now appears in some limbo state between its original form
and an exacting, though partially imagined, rehabilitation.
Authentication is a serious but
subjective business. I’m not the man to affirm or reject its
attribution; it is accepted as a Leonardo by many serious scholars,
though not all. I can say, however, what I felt I was looking at when I
took my place among the crowds who’d queued an hour or more to behold
and endlessly photograph “Salvator Mundi”: a proficient but not
especially distinguished religious picture from turn-of-the-16th-century
Lombardy, put through a wringer of restorations.
Its
most engaging passages are in the embroidered blue gown that Christ
wears. The robe’s folds are supple and sinuous, and the trim, zigzagged
with an elaborate and unbroken knotting pattern, has a mathematical
intricacy that gives this Christian painting a surprising Islamic touch.
(Technical analysis confirms that Leonardo used pure lapis lazuli for
the robe, rather than cheaper azurite.)
The orb that
Christ holds in his left hand, symbolizing his dominion over all
creation, is not as showy as Dan Brown devotees might like, but its
watery coloring, glossy edges and dimpled bottom do the trick well
enough. His curly hair, especially the lower tresses framing Christ’s
neckline, has a certain corkscrew adeptness, though it’s not as
proficient as the similarly kinky locks of Leonardo’s recently restored “St. John the Baptist,” at the Louvre in Paris, or Botticelli’s slightly earlier “Portrait of a Lady,” at the Städel in Frankfurt.
Yet
there’s a meekness and monotony to “Salvator Mundi” that can’t be
redeemed by these marginally engaging details. The savior of the world
appears in this painting as a soft, spumy cipher. His eyes are blank.
His chin, flecked with stubble, recedes into shadow. The raised right
hand is stiffer and less sensate than John the Baptist’s, and overlit
relative to his shaded cheeks and mouth.
And unlike other Leonardo portraits — “St. John the Baptist” and the Mona Lisa, or the alluring “Lady With an Ermine,” or “La Belle Ferronnière,”
recently shipped from the Louvre to Abu Dhabi — here the subject
appears head-on, flattened into the picture frame like a medieval icon
painting. Other sophisticated paintings from around 1500, such as Albrecht Dürer’s Christifying self-portrait
in Munich’s Alte Pinakothek, made use of such frontal orientation. But
where Dürer’s self-portrait as Christ radiates authority, “Salvator
Mundi” retires into itself. This Jesus, far from saving the world, might
struggle to save himself a seat on a crosstown bus.
Of
course, the painting’s place within the history of northern Italian art
was not at hand in the sale room on Wednesday, nor did it trouble the
thousands of visitors who saw it in New York, London or Hong Kong.
Displayed in a darkened gallery under spotlights, framed by a pair of
security guards wearing funereal black, the Leonardo was presented
almost as a holy relic — and Christie’s marketing department rolled out
the superlatives alongside, sending the painting on a world tour and
hyping it with the rather sacrilegious nickname of “the male Mona Lisa.”
The
fantasy of individual genius was on offer, a fantasy more seductive and
enduring than any in Western art. It can infuse even the driest of
pictures with the illusion of greatness, and price tags this bloated,
too, can imbue workaday art with new weight. But reputations rise and
fall, attributions are assigned and reconsidered, and money — well,
money can’t buy you everything. When its new owner gazes at “Salvator
Mundi” over the mantelpiece (or, more likely, visits it in a
climate-controlled, tax-free storage facility) he or she may have cause
to reflect on the Gospel of Luke.
“Blessed
are ye that hunger now: for ye shall be filled,” intones the man in the
$450 million picture. “But woe unto you that are rich! for ye have
received your consolation.”
This Topic On this Version At This Article Appears on , of the New York edition with the headline: A Blockbuster Painting Is No ‘Mona Lisa’
After
19 minutes of dueling, with four bidders on the telephone and one in
the room, Leonardo da Vinci’s “Salvator Mundi” sold on Wednesday night
for $450.3 million with fees, shattering the high for any work of art
sold at auction. It far surpassed Picasso’s “Women of Algiers,” which
fetched $179.4 million at Christie’s in May 2015. The buyer was not
immediately disclosed.
There were
gasps throughout the sale, as the bids climbed by tens of millions up to
$225 million, by fives up to $260 million, and then by twos. As the
bidding slowed, and a buyer pondered the next multi-million-dollar
increment, Jussi Pylkkanen, the auctioneer, said, “It’s an historic
moment; we’ll wait.”
Toward the end,
Alex Rotter, Christie’s co-chairman of postwar and contemporary art, who
represented a buyer on the phone, made two big jumps to shake off one
last rival bid from Francois de Poortere, Christie’s head of old master
paintings.
The price is all the more remarkable at a time when the old masters market is contracting, because of limited supply and collectors’ penchant for contemporary art.
The last moments of the historic bidding war for Leonardo da Vinci’s “Salvator Mundi.”Published OnCreditCreditImage by Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times
And to critics,
the astronomical sale attests to something else — the degree to which
salesmanship has come to drive and dominate the conversation about art
and its value. Some art experts pointed to the painting’s damaged
condition and its questionable authenticity.
“This
was a thumping epic triumph of branding and desire over connoisseurship
and reality,” said Todd Levin, a New York art adviser.
The painting ‘Salvator Mundi’ by Leonardo da Vinci at Christie’s.CreditDrew Angerer/Getty Images
Christie’s
marketing campaign was perhaps unprecedented in the art world; it was
the first time the auction house went so far as to enlist an outside
agency to advertise the work. Christie’s also released a video
that included top executives pitching the painting to Hong Kong clients
as “the holy grail of our business” and likening it to “the discovery
of a new planet.” Christie’s called the work “the Last da Vinci,” the
only known painting by the Renaissance master still in a private
collection (some 15 others are in museums).
“It’s
been a brilliant marketing campaign,” said Alan Hobart, director of the
Pyms Gallery in London, who has acquired museum-quality artworks across
a range of historical periods for the British businessman and collector
Graham Kirkham. “This is going to be the future.”
There was a
palpable air of anticipation at Christie’s Rockefeller Center
headquarters as the art market’s major players filed into the sales
room. The capacity crowd included top dealers like Larry Gagosian, David
Zwirner and Marc Payot of Hauser & Wirth. Major collectors had
traveled here for the sale, among them Eli Broad and Michael Ovitz from
Los Angeles; Martin Margulies from Miami; and Stefan Edlis from Chicago.
Christie’s had produced special red paddles for those bidding on the
Leonardo, and many of its specialists taking bids on the phone wore
elegant black.
Earlier, 27,000 people
had lined up at pre-auction viewings in Hong Kong, London, San
Francisco and New York to glimpse the painting of Christ as “Savior of
the World.” Members of the public — indeed, even many cognoscenti —
cared little if at all whether the painting might have been executed in
part by studio assistants; whether Leonardo had actually made the work
himself; or how much of the canvas had been repainted and restored. They
just wanted to see a masterwork that dates from about 1500 and was
rediscovered in 2005.
“There is
extraordinary consensus it is by Leonardo,” said Nicholas Hall, the
former co-chairman of old master paintings at Christie’s, who now runs
his own Manhattan gallery. “This is the most important old master
painting to have been sold at auction in my lifetime.”
That
is the kind of name-brand appeal that Christie’s was presumably banking
on by placing the painting in its high-profile contemporary art sale,
rather than in its less sexy annual old master auction, where it
technically belongs. To some extent, the auction house succeeded with
the painting even before the sale, having secured a guaranteed $100
million bid from an unidentified third party. It is the 12th artwork to
break the $100 million mark at auction, and a new high for any old
master at auction, surpassing Rubens’s “Massacre of the Innocents,”
which sold for $76.7 million in 2002 (or more than $105 million, adjusted for inflation).
But
many art experts argue that Christie’s used marketing window dressing
to mask the baggage that comes with the Leonardo, from its compromised
condition to its complicated buying history and said that the auction
house put the artwork in a contemporary sale to circumvent the scrutiny
of old masters experts, many of whom have questioned the painting’s
authenticity and condition.
“The
composition doesn’t come from Leonardo,” said Jacques Franck, a
Paris-based art historian and Leonardo specialist. “He preferred twisted
movement. It’s a good studio work with a little Leonardo at best, and
it’s very damaged.”
“It’s
been called ‘the male Mona Lisa,’” he said, “but it doesn’t look like
it at all.” Mr. Franck said he has examined the Mona Lisa out of its
frame five times.
Luke Syson, curator
of the 2011 National Gallery exhibition in London that featured the
painting, said in his catalog essay that “the picture has suffered.”
While both hands are well preserved, he said, the painting was
“aggressively over cleaned,” resulting in abrasion of the whole surface,
“especially in the face and hair of Christ.”
Christie’s
maintains that it was upfront about the much-restored, damaged
condition of the oil-on-panel, which shows Christ with his right hand
raised in blessing and his left holding a crystal orb.
But
Christie’s was also slow to release an official condition report and
its authenticity warranty on the Leonardo runs out in five years, as it
does on all lots bought at its auctions, according to the small print in
the back of its sale catalog.
The auction house has also played down the painting’s volatile sales history.
The artwork has been the subject of legal disputes and amassed a price history that ranges from less than $10,000 in 2005, when it was spotted at an estate auction, to $200 million when
it was first offered for sale by a consortium of three dealers in 2012.
But no institution besides the Dallas Museum of Art, which in 2012 made
an undisclosed offer on the painting, showed public interest in buying
it. Finally, in 2013, Sotheby’s sold it privately for $80 million to
Yves Bouvier, a Swiss art dealer and businessman. Soon afterward, he
sold it for $127.5 million, to the family trust of the Russian
billionaire collector Dmitry E. Rybolovlev. Mr. Rybolovlev’s family trust was the seller on Wednesday night.
There
was speculation that Liu Yiqian, a Chinese billionaire and co-founder
with his wife of the Long Museum in Shanghai, may have been among the
bidders. In recent years, the former taxi-driver-turned-power collector
has become known for his splashy, record-breaking art purchases,
including an Amedeo Modigliani nude painting for $170.4 million at a
Christie’s auction in 2015. But in a message sent to a reporter via
WeChat, a Chinese messaging app, Mr. Liu said he was not among the
bidders for the Leonardo.
On Thursday
morning, soon after the final sale was announced, Mr. Liu posted a
message on his WeChat social media feed. “Da Vinci’s Savior sold for 400
million USD, congratulations to the buyer,” he wrote. “Feeling kind of
defeated right now.”
Correction: Was Before
An
earlier version of this article misstated the given name of Christie’s
head of old master paintings. He is Francois de Poortere, not Francis.
Zao Wou-Ki’s Rare Painting Could Fetch HK$150 Million at Christie’s
By
Fang Block
March 25, 2019 3:11 p.m. ET
A member of
Christie's (C) speaks at a media preview for the unveiling of "Triptych
1987-1988" by artist Zao Wou-Ki in the central district of Hong Kong on
March 25, 2019.
ISAAC LAWRENCE/AFP/Getty Images
An exceedingly rare work by renowned French-Chinese artist Zao Wou-Ki
is expected to sell for between HK$120 million and HK$150 million
(US$15 million-US$20 million) at Christie’s Hong Kong this spring. Measuring two meters tall and 4.86 meters long (over 78 inches by 191 inches), the Triptych 1987-1988
is the second largest painting by Zao (1920-2013), who created only 20
triptychs—a painting on three panels—throughout his lifetime, according
to Christie’s. The work will lead Christie’s evening sale of
Asian 20th-century and contemporary art on May 25, marking its first
appearance on the market for over 31 years.
“Influenced by Henri Matisse’s series of ‘open window’ paintings and Claude Monet’s Nymphéas,
the work uses rich color and dramatic composition to depict a
transcendent abstract space, suggestive of a moment of sublime genesis,”
according to Christie’s description of the painting.
02.01.65, a 1965
painting considered to be one of the best examples of Zao Wou-Ki's
Hurricane Period," will be auctioned in Hong Kong this May.
Courtesy of Christie'sZao Wou-Ki (also known as Zhao Wuji) studied calligraphy and Chinese
painting at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, emigrated to France in
1948, and became a member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris in
2002.Often compared to
masters such as Picasso, Matisse, and Joan Miró, Zao’s work has come
onto the radar of major collectors in recent years.Last September, his masterpiece Juin-Octobre 1985 realized US$65 million at Sotheby’s Hong Kong, setting a new world record for an Asian artist.Christie’s sold his 1959 painting 14.12.59 for HK$177 million last spring, more than double its presale high estimate of HK$88 million.This spring, Christie’s sale will also include 02.01.65,
a 1965 painting considered to be one of the best examples of Zao’s
“Hurricane Period,” where he integrated the energy and movement of
Chinese cursive calligraphy with Western abstract expressionism.Zao’s
work from the same decade, when he was most artistically creative, has
achieved numerous record prices over the years, says Christie’s, which
didn’t disclose the presale estimate of this painting on offer. LLC 501C- 4 UCC 1-308.ALL RIGHTS RESERVED WITHOUT PREJUDICE
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