Painting By The Numbers, We shouldn’t judge quality of fine art by the dollar amount being paid by a collector” but we can’t help but be interested after The Scream went for $120 million. In early May, Munch’s The Scream was sold by Sotheby’s for $119.9 million, making it the highest price achieved for a painting to
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Why Picasso is Attractive for First-Time Art Buyers…And Auctioneers Blue-Chip Period What a performer! Ivan Lindsay on the reasons why that randy old goat Pablo Picasso remains so irresistibly attractive to neophyte art collectors (not to mention auctioneers) A RECENT BLOOMBERG article led with the line: ‘Pablo Picasso has been dethroned.’ The article was referring
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Drawing Conclusions………By Ivan Lindsay The recent record price of £29.2m for a Raphael drawing confirms demand for important Old Master drawings. On Tuesday 8th December at Christie’s London a Raphael drawing entitled Head of a Muse was sold for £29.2m, doubling its estimate of £12m–16m and setting a world record price for a work on
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Family Jewels Faberge heirs buy back the name and relaunch the jeweller by Ivan Lindsay Fabergé, jeweller to the last tsars, the British royal family and the European aristocracy before WWI, has been re-launched this summer by Sarah and Tatiana Fabergé.  The two cousins, the last surviving great-granddaughters of Peter Carl Fabergé, have teamed up
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‘Russian Art Revolution,’an introduction to the emerging Russian art market, Country House magazine, Issue No. 3, May 2007. A sleeping bear awakes Anyone working in upmarket real estate, oil, gas, diamonds, timber, mining or metals will already be aware that the Russians have arrived. The marriage between Russia’s vast natural resources and Western markets is
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In a recent GstaadLife editorial, Taki, Gstaad’s self-appointed gatekeeper and commentator, wrote an article entitled ‘The fabric of Gstaad’, in which he wonders if Gstaad is going to follow Courcheval, Chamonix and Verbier in becoming a playground for the Russian oligarchs and a Monte Carlo in Saanen. He blames the Russians for the problems in
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Ivan Lindsay is a private art dealer in European and Russian paintings and has established world record prices for many artists including Goya, Canaletto and Hobbema. He is also a publisher and writer and writes for the magazines Country House, Millionaire, Spears Wealth Management Survey and the Art Book Journal. The indispensability of Russia’s vast
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Collecting art dates back to classical antiquity. The Romans collected Greek sculpture and, when no original was available, commissioned copies of famous works. Paintings, too, were collected but none have survived except for Egyptian Mummy portraits and Roman wall decoration. In the Dark Ages the concept of the individual artist was lost, but not the
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By Ivan Lindsay. Anyone working in mining, metals, diamonds, oil and gas, timber or up-market property is now dealing with the Russians on a regular basis. The marriage of Russian resources to Western consumers is creating huge fortunes and some of this excess capital is helping drive the already overheated Western art market and create
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The aim of this essay is to give an introduction to the Russian Art Market as of writing, summer 2006. With the exception of a few areas that have attracted Western collectors, such as the early 20th century painters like the Cubists and the Supremacists, interest in Russian art lay dormant for most of the
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