The Magazine Antiques

The Market | By Staff

This week's top lots

February 5, 2010  |  
What: L'Homme qui marche I by Alberto Giacometti, 1960
Where: Sotheby's London (February 3, Impressionist and Modern Art Evening Sale)
Estimate: £12-18 million
Sold For: £65 million

Fetching $104.3 million, Giacometti's iconic 6-foot tall sculpture set a new world record price for a work of art at auction (previously held by Picasso's Garçon à la pipe, which sold for $104.2 million in 2004). The cast bronze sculpture of a wiry male figure was the first of two versions made for an outdoor installation at the Chase Manhattan Plaza but never completed. A cast of the sculpture was exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1962.
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The Market | By Staff

This week's top lots

January 29, 2010  |  
What: Portrait of a Woman, called "La Belle Ferronnière," before 1750
Where: Sotheby's New York (January 28, Old Master Paintings and Sculpture)
Estimate: $300,000-500,000
Sold For: $1.5 million

This well-known painting is another version of a portrait—believed to be Lucrezia Crivelli, the mistress of Ludovico Sforza, the Duke of Milan—now at the Louvre. Long debated to be the work of Leonardo da Vinci (Sotheby's attributes it to a follower of da Vinci, citing recent technical examination that dates the canvas to the first half of the 17th century and most likely by a French painter). In the 1920s the Sotheby's portrait was at the center of an unusual court case, when its owners, Harry and Andrée Hahn, sued the art dealer Joseph Duveen for slander when he suggested that the painting was a copy. Numerous art world experts were called to testify but the trial ended with a hung jury, and Duveen was forced to settle out of court and paid the Hahns $60,000 in damages.
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The Market | By Staff

This week's top lots

January 22, 2010  |  
What: Punch bowl mark of Cornelius Kierstede, New York, 1700-10
Where: Sotheby's New York (January 22, Important Americana)
Estimate: $400,000-800,000
Sold For: $5.9 million

This punch bowl—the largest known example of early 18th-century American silver—descended in the family of Commodore Joshua Loring of Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts. It was brought to London after Joshua Loring Jr., who fought with the British army in the Revolutionary War, reunited with his parents, who had previously fled to England. The punch bowl was  stored in the family's bank vault for over 230 years, and only came to light in England last year. It has been suggested that the punch bowl's original owner may have  Col. Abraham de Peyster, Mayor of New York City from 1692 to 1694, as most of Kierstede's patrons were wealthy and prominent New Yorkers. About thirty-two pieces by Kierstede are known today and most are in museum collections.
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The Market | By Eleanor H. Gustafson

Dealers bring biggest & best to the 56th Annual Winter Antiques Show

January 22, 2010  |  There is no arguing with the idea that the Winter Antiques Show, which opened last night at the Park Avenue Armory in New York, is the BIG one. Now in its fifty-sixth year, its seventy-five dealers from around the world are showcasing some of the very best in the decorative arts, painting, and folk art. There is a lot to see, and some of it is huge. We've picked out a few that are hard to overlook. You really can't miss James and Nancy Glazer's majestic copper elk right inside the entrance. Standing ten feet high, it was made about 1903 by the W. H. Mullins Company of Salem, Ohio, and originally topped the Elks Club in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. Across the aisle, Todd Prickett of C. L. Prickett has an exceptional Boston block-front chest-on-chest (c. 1775) that's almost eight feet tall-and was included in Luke Vincent Lockwood's seminal Colonial Furniture in America of 1913.

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It might seem that Gerald Peters Gallery has only five objects on offer, they are so enormous, but there are several smaller pieces as well. The centerpiece, of 1914, is a fourteen thousand-pound, nine-foot-tall urn carved by Paul Manship from a block of Tennessee marble with a neoclassical frieze of Indians hunting buffalo and engaged in intertribal warfare. On the booth walls hang Manship's Four Elements, four of eight parcel-gilt bronze reliefs he did for façades of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company's old headquarters in downtown Manhattan (the other four are in the Philadelphia Museum of Art). All eight were detached during AT&T's removal from the building in the 1980s. Considerably smaller but equally powerful is the gallery's collection of British Championship Animals, modeled by Herbert Haseltine in 1925.
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