Sotheby's

by RobertLacey (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  1998

  $3.27

  This volume explores the history of Sotheby's auction house, tracing its beginnings back to 1744. It was in the latter half of the 19th century, when economic instability forced the aristocrats to sell off many of their treasures, that Sotheby's began to lay the foundations of the modern art market. The Sotheby's-Christie's rivalry intensified in the early-1900s and they have been battling it out ever since over the likes of Cezanne, Picasso, Van Gogh and Monet. Lacey takes the reader through the unprecedented boom of the 1980s, when Van Gogh's Irises went for $53.9 million, and examines the catastrophic effects of an inflation still being felt today.

• Used

  Hardcover
  1998

  $3.27

  In this account of the world's oldest and richest auction house, Lacey brings to life the personalities, ambition, and shrewd business dealings behind the glamour and glitz. From the socially ambitious parson's son Montague Barlow to the endlessly charming, brilliant, and amoral aristocrat Peter Wilson to the present owner, American shopping mall magnate A. Alfred Taubman, and his flamboyant lieutenant Diana D. Brooks, the managers of Sotheby's have learned how to dress their rummage sales for the rich in a glowing patina of scholarship, taste, and social distinction. Robert Lacey reports from the inside on such recent events as the auction of the personal property of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis in 1996 and Mohamed al-Fayed's sale of the goods of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor in February 1998. He traces the history of the long and often bitter rivalry with Sotheby's only significant adversary, Christie's, the other auction house. He tells how top executives from the two houses compete in the wooing of wealthy widows and estate lawyers to grab the rights to the few artistic masterpieces left in private hands, and to uncover new categories of collectibles to tempt the appetite of a relentlessly consumerist world.