Auctioneers Who Made Art History

Procurement analysis, sales planning, customer orientation, brand management—the art market is changing more rapidly than ever before. The price that a work of art commands influences its place in the art-historical canon. Auction houses have become dominant avenues of distribution, as have art fairs, galleries, and art dealers. Even today the ritual dramaturgy of the auction resembles an archaic competition, which can leave participants speechless and captivate bystanders. At the center of the action is the auctioneer, whose performance is increasingly critical to the success of the auction. With portraits of auctioneers, this volume tells the story of the art auction business. Key events that played out in cities such as New York, Paris, Zurich, Berlin, Stuttgart, and Pompeii come alive and show how the auctioneer is emerging from the anonymity of a service provider and stepping into the limelight as the star of the show.

"Art auctions have long captured the public imagination. They regularly make news headlines and have become synonymous with glamour, money and social distinction. The marketing of auction houses and the works they sell has resulted in firms attaining authoritative positions and the ability both to influence and reflect collecting tastes. Pedigree and panache is the first comprehensive history of the art auction in Australia. In this fascinating work, Shireen Huda investigates the construction of the glamorous reputation of art auctions and art auction houses. Featuring absorbing case studies of key art auctions and major art auction houses in Australia (including Christies, Sothebys and Deutscher-Menzies) the work provides an overview of the origin and international development of art auctions. The development of the Australian marketplace is then explored, detailing colonial inception and continuing until Christies' withdrawal of its saleroom presence in 2006."--Provided by publisher.

Just as William Goldman, the ultimate screenwriter, took us inside Hollywood, Simon de Pury, the ultimate art player, will take us inside an even more secretive business, whose staggering prices, famous collectors, and high crimes are front page news almost every day. The former Chairman of Sotheby's Europe, the former owner of Sotheby's rival Phillips de Pury, and currently a London-based dealer and advisor to great collectors around the world, Simon has one of the highest profiles of any non-artist in the art world. Even though he has an ancient title and the aura of an elegant Swiss banker, Simon is famous as an iconoclast and is known as "The Mick Jagger of Auctions" for his showmanship and exuberance. His whole life in art has been devoted to bringing art to the public and to the juxtaposition of high and low. Movie stars, musicians, and athletes compete with hedge funders and billionaires for the great art, and Simon is their pied piper; he wants to turn the world onto art and this book will be his message.

In Anonymous Art at Auction, Anne-Sophie V. Radermecker takes the opposing view of the superstar economy by examining contemporary sales of Early Flemish paintings with unknown authorship and the effects of various substitutes for real names on price formation.

Volume III in the 'Studies in the History of Collection' series, published in association with the Beazley Archive in the University of Oxford. 14 papers on The Mechanisms of the Art Market 1660-1830 presented at a symposium at the Wallace Collection, London in December 2003. Contents: Introduction (Neil De Marchi); 1) The Art Trade and its Urban Context: England and the Netherlands compared, 1550-1750 (David Ormrod); 2) The Auction Duty Act of 1777: the beginning of institutionalisation of auctions in Britain (Satomi Ohashi); 3) The Almoneda: the second-hand art market in Spain (Mari-Tere Alvarez); 4) The Market for Netherlandish Paintings in Paris, 1750-1815 (Hans J. Van Miegroet); 5) Le tableau et son prix a Paris, 1760-80 (Patrick Michel); 6) The System Governing Appraised Value in Ancien Regime France (Alden R. Gordon); 7) The Marquis de Vasse Against the Art Dealer Jacques Lenglier: a case-study of an eighteenth-century Parisian auction (Francois Marandet); 8) Pierre Sirois (1665-1726): le premier marchand de Watteau (Guillaume Glorieux); 9) The Purchase of the Past: Dr Richard Rawlinson (1690-1755) and the collecting of history (John Cherry); 10) John Anderson and John Bouttats: picture dealers in eighteenth-century London (David Connell); 11) Sir Godfrey Copley as Patron and Consumer, 1685-1705 (David Mitchell); 12) The Rise and Fall of a British Connoisseur: the career of Michael Bryan (1757-1821), picture dealer extraordinaire (Julia Armstrong-Totten); 13) 'In Keeping with the Truth': the German art market and its role in the development of connoisseurship in the eighteenth century (Thomas Ketelsen); 14) Abraham Hume e Giovanni Maria Sasso: il mercato artistico tra Venezia e Londra nel settecento (Linda Borean).

In this study of Amsterdam's Golden Age cultural elite, John Michael Montias analyzes records of auctions from the Orphan Chamber of Amsterdam through the first half of the seventeenth century, revealing a wealth of information on some 2,000 art buyers' regional origins, social and religious affiliations, wealth, and aesthetic preferences. Chapters focus not only on the art dealers who bought at these auctions, but also on buyers who had special connections with individual artists.

Here for the first time is the history of art dealers, those extraordinary men and woman who, over centuries (and almost entirely out of the public eye), built their profession on a singular skill: identifying the intangible but infinitely desirable qualities that characterize the greatest works of art—and finding clients for whom those qualities are irresistible. Philip Hook’s riveting narrative takes us from the early days of art dealing in Antwerp, where paintings were sold by weight, to the unassailable hauteur of contemporary galleries in New York, London, Paris, and beyond. Along the way, we meet a surprisingly wide-ranging cast of characters—from tailors, spies, and the occasional anarchist to scholars, aristocrats, and connoisseurs, some compelled by greed, some by their own vision of art—and some by the art of the deal. Among them are Joseph Duveen, who almost single-handedly brought the Old Masters to America; Paul Durand-Ruel, the Impressionists’ champion; Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, high priest of Cubism; Leo Castelli, dealer-midwife to Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art; and Peter Wilson, the charismatic Sotheby’s chairman who made a theater of the auction room. Rogues’ Gallery bursts with unforgettable anecdotes and astute judgments about art and artists, honed by Hook’s more than forty years in the art market—making it essential reading for anyone interested in the hidden history of art.