The amount Francis Bacon’s 1969 ” Three Studies of Lucian Freud” was auctioned off for at a sale at Christie’s, the most ever paid for a work of art. The previous record was held by Edvard Munch’s “The Scream,” which went for $119.9 million in 2012. The record could possibly be broken again tonight, when Andy Warhol’s 1963 painting “Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster)” hits the auction block at Sotheby’s in New York. (Marketplace)
The total value of a cache of 1,406 artworks found last year in in the Munich apartment of Cornelius Gurlitt, son of a Nazi art dealer. The German government began publishing details of the artworks in the hoard this week that may have been seized by the Nazis or lost by Jewish collectors in forced sales. Families of the artworks’ previous owners are working with authorities to see the paintings returned, but the incident has raised questions about whether more art lost during the Holocaust still resides in private collections. (Bloomberg)
The amount one group of Romanian art thieves made off of their heist last year of two drawings by Monet and one painting each by Gauguin, Picasso, Matisse, Lucian Freud and Jacob Meyer de Haan from a Rotterdam museum. Speculation in the press initially had valued the stolen works at around $400 million, but the high-profile nature of the theft made the paintings and drawings impossible to sell, at least for the criminals inexperienced in the black market of stolen art. (The New York Times)
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