Art Sale

Hong Kong Police Search Landfill for $3.7 Mln Painting

Wonder how the contract read. . . When did title transfer over? Is the artist responsible for the cost if it cannot be found. **DB

“Hong Kong Police Search Landfill for $3.7 Mln Painting”

by AFP

“Hong Kong (AFP) – Hong Kong police on Wednesday searched for a valuable painting mistakenly dumped in a landfill after it sold for $3.7 million at auction, reports said.

 “Snowy Mountain” by Chinese artist Cui Ruzhuo, which was a main feature of the spring auction by Beijing-based Poly Culture this week, was dumped by cleaners at the luxury hotel hosting the sale, the South China Morning Post said.

Grand Hyatt hotel cleaners were suspected of dumping the painting, which sold on Monday for more than HK$28.75 million ($3.71 million), along with rubbish that was taken to a landfill, the paper said, citing an unnamed police source.

Poly Culture did not comment immediately when contacted by AFP.

Police suspected the painting was thrown out by cleaners after viewing security camera images but would not rule out the possibility of it having been stolen, media reported.

Police told AFP a theft case was reported on Tuesday by an auction house staff member regarding a painting, without giving further details.

A Grant Hyatt spokeswoman would not confirm if the painting had been dumped as trash but said hotel staff did not handle items sold at the auction because they were too expensive.

She said in an emailed statement to AFP that organisers would hire their own security and contractors for such events involving “high-value” items.

The spring sale was the first major auction organised by Poly Culture in Hong Kong following its stock debut in March.

Poly Culture Group, the world’s third largest auction house by revenue behind Sotheby’s and Christie’s, is a subsidiary of state-run conglomerate Poly Group. . . .

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Rare $39 Million Ming Dynasty Cup to Be Part of Auction

Rare $39 Million Ming Dynasty Cup to Be Part of Auction

by Frederick Balfour

A 15th-century ceramic cup from the Ming Dynasty will be included in a Sotheby’s (BID) auction next month in Hong Kong, after the seller retracted an earlier decision to pull the sale.

The cup, valued at HK$200 million ($26 million) to HK$300 million, will be offered at Sotheby’s on April 8, according to Nicolas Chow, deputy chairman of Sotheby’s Asia and International Head of Chinese Ceramics and Works of Art.

The seller, a Swiss collector in his nineties who had earlier asked to pull the cup from the sale, changed his mind, said Giuseppe Eskenazi, who originally sold the piece to the collector in 2000 and is advising the seller.

The cup was promoted in a March 6 press release by Sotheby’s as a “potential record breaker” and is considered the finest piece of Chinese ceramics in private hands. It comes from the Meiyintang Collection, whose owner has vacillated over selling it, said Eskenazi, a London-based dealer who originally sold the piece to him in 2000.

“It’s such a great treasure, he didn’t want to part with it as he treasured it so much,” Eskenazi, who helped the seller place pieces with Sotheby’s before, said by telephone today. “But finally, he agreed a few hours ago to go ahead.”

Emperor Allegory

Eskenazi, who bought the cup for almost HK$30 million in 1999, sold it one year later to its present owner.

“This is the most valuable piece of porcelain in any private collection,” he said.

The cup, made for the Chenghua emperor (1465-1487) is considered the most rare of Chinese ceramics and may set an auction record, according to the Sotheby’s press release. It has been nicknamed the “Chicken Cup” because it depicts a rooster, his hen and their chicks, an allegorical representation of the emperor, the empress and their subjects.

“We are very excited to present this in the sale,” Chow said by telephone. “It is the single most expensive, single most sought after Chinese porcelain ever offered at auction.”

The “Chicken Cup” is only 8 centimeters (3.1 inches) in diameter, delicate and dainty,  . . . .

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“Detroit Needs Money. Can A ‘Grand Bargain’ Save The City’s Art?”

“Detroit Needs Money. Can A ‘Grand Bargain’ Save The City’s Art?”

by Elizabeth Blair via “NPR”

“Can wealthy art lovers help save Detroit’s pension funds — and one of its museums?

The city is struggling to find ways to emerge from bankruptcy. One idea: sell the city’s art to save the pensions of city retirees. The Detroit Institute of Arts, or DIA, has faced serious financial difficulties over the years, and yet it holds the city’s most valuable assets: a world-class art collection that includes works by Van Gogh, Rembrandt and Matisse. Estimates vary, but Christie’s recently appraised these works at more than $850 million.

Because some of those masterpieces were bought with city funds, they could be auctioned off to pay creditors. “It’s the only source of money that exists in the city of Detroit,” philanthropist Paul Schaap says flatly.  . . . .”

 

“Paintings looted by Nazi, recovered by Allies to be auctioned in NY”

“Paintings looted by Nazi, recovered by Allies to be auctioned in NY”

by Patricia Reaney via “Yahoo News“

“NEW YORK (Reuters) – Paintings looted by the Nazis during World War Two and retrieved by the Monuments Men, the Allied group tasked with returning masterpieces to their rightful owners, will be sold at auction on Thursday in New York.

The works, which will go under the hammer during Sotheby’s sale of Important Old Master Paintings and Sculpture, were among the tens of thousands of works recovered by the art experts whose story is told in the George Clooney film “The Monuments Men,” which opens in U.S. theaters on February 7.

“The scale of looting was absolutely extraordinary,” said Lucian Simmons, Sotheby’s head of restitution.

“In France, for example, 36,000 paintings were stolen from institutions and largely from individuals. The Monuments Men managed to recover and return the majority of those,” he said in an interview.

Two small paintings in the sale, “La cueillette des roses” and “Le musicien” by the French rococo artist Jean-Baptise Pater, were chosen by Adolf Hitler’s air force chief Hermann Goering for his personal collection. . . . . .”

“The Confidence, and the Art, Looked Real”

“The Confidence, and the Art, Looked Real”

by Patricia Cohen via “New York Times”

“To many people, the art dealer Jose Carlos Bergantiños Diaz seemed like an enviable man.  He came to the United States from Spain with his Mexican inamorata, Glafira Rosales, some 30 years ago, barely a dollar in his pocket, and only a few words of English at his command. Soon, he was living life on a grand stage. He bought a fine house in a wealthy New York suburb, opened an art gallery with Ms. Rosales and maintained auction accounts at Christie’s and Sotheby’s.He boasted of a friendship with Andy Warhol, an audience with the pope and his daughter’s violin performance at the Clinton White House. He created a charity that helped the poor and the sick in the Dominican Republic and Haiti, and won awards for his humanitarianism.

Behind the curtain, though, federal prosecutors say, Mr. Bergantiños was engaged in a very different sort of enterprise, a daring forgery swindle that fooled the art world and led collectors to spend more than $80 million on dozens of phony masterworks. The marketing of these forgeries, many of them sold through the offices of what was once New York’s oldest gallery, Knoedler & Company, has been among the most stunning art market scandals of the last decade. . . .”

I’ll just bet he’s out of the country; I can’t imagine having the cahoney’s to pull something like this off. And it begs the question of how well Knoedler & Co. were investigating the works they processed. Where are the provenance records, the testing process results, etc.? Were those forged as well, or were they not included in the sale? In this day and age, how were so many forged items passed of?