Description
A colorful and fast-moving account of how postwar London became the global center of the art market–a story of Impressionist masterpieces, dodgy dealers, and ground-breaking financial transactions.
On October 15, 1958, Sotheby’s of Bond Street staged an “event sale” of seven Impressionist paintings belonging to Erwin Goldschmidt: three Manets, two Cézannes, one Van Gogh, and a Renoir. Kirk Douglas, Anthony Quinn, and Somerset Maugham were there as celebrity guests. The seven lots went for 781,000–at the time the highest price for a single sale. The event established London as the world center of the art market and Sotheby’s as an international auction house. It began a shift in power from the dealers to the auctioneers and paved the way for Impressionist paintings to dominate the market for the next forty years. Sotheby’s had pulled off a massive coup by capturing the Impressionist market from Paris and New York–and now began its inexorable rise, opening offices all over the world. A huge expansion of the market followed, accompanied by rocketing prices, colorful scandals, and legal dramas. London transformed itself from a fusty place of old master painting sales to a revitalized center of contemporary art, crowned by the opening of Tate Modern in 2000. The Tate Modern successfully united new (and mostly foreign) money in London with the art world, offering its patrons a ready-made sophisticated social milieu alongside dealers in contemporary art. In a vibrant and briskly-paced style, James Stourton tells the story of the London art market from the immediate postwar period to the turn of the millennium. While Sotheby’s is the lynchpin of this story, Stourton populates his narrative with a glorious rogue’s gallery of eccentric scholars, clever amateurs, brilliant emigrés, and stylish grandees with a flair for the deal.Binding Type: Hardcover
Author: James Stourton
Published: 02/04/2025
Publisher: Pegasus Books
ISBN: 9781639368235
Pages: 432
Weight: 1.35lbs
Size: 1.60″ H x 9.30″ L x 6.50″ W
About the Author
Stourton, James: – James Stourton is a British art historian, a former chairman of Sotheby’s UK, and the author of Kenneth Clark and Great Houses of London. Stourton frequently lectures to Cambridge University’s History of Art Faculty, Sotheby’s Institute of Education, and The Art Fund. He also sits on the Heritage Memorial Fund, a government panel that meets to decide what constitutes heritage and should be saved for the Britain nation. He lives in London.
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