Magna Carta's worth is relative these days. Last night, Sotheby's sold Ross Perot's copy of the 13th century English charter that gave birth to habeas corpus and set the foundation for basic human rights. The buyer was Carlyle Group founder David Rubenstein who paid $21 million for it, less than the record price paid for Jeff Koons's Hanging Heart last month and about half the sum required to obtain an apartment at 15 Central Park West. Michael Moore may have a seizure and finally move to Canada.

Still, the single sheet of parchment dating from 1297 scored quite a mark-up over the $1.5 million Perot paid for it in 1983 when he acquired the 2,500-word medieval Latin manuscript from the Brudenell family of Deene Park. Twenty-some years later Perot's family-run foundation decided to sell the sole copy in private hands (a total of 17 originals are known to survive before the year 1300) and the only Magna Carta outside of Britain aside from an example in Australia. The manuscript, which carries the seal of King Edward I, was estimated to make $20/30 million (with proceeds going to education, medicine, and assisting wounded soldiers and their families), a fraction of the some $60 million Perot reportedly paid in his bid to become president in 1992.

Shortly after 7 p.m., Sotheby's vice-chairman David Redden took to the podium before 150 seated guests, a single phone bank, and a salesroom thick with professional camera crews alongside burly men with digital cameras and Revolutionary War types sporting curled mustaches. "So Magna Carta . . . " Redden announced with understated relish, "What should we say? $12 million to start it . . ." Bidding was nonexistent in the room aside from a lone suitor, a fair-skinned female seated in the phone bank, bidding on behalf of Rubenstein. "On the telephone, on my left. Fair warning at 19 million dollars," Redden paused before bringing down his hammer. "$19 million to the telephone."

Magna Carta's debut at auction lasted less than five minutes. The crowd applauded the result, then milled about waiting for word about the identity of the new owner who would join the ranks of Bill Gates, the buyer of Leonardo da Vinci's Codex Leicester for $30.8 million at Christie's in 1994, and television and movie producer Norman Lear who paid $8.14 million for a copy of the Declaration of Independence seven years ago (some may recall spotting it at P. Diddy's 2004 White Party).

Rubenstein, who flew in last night to attend the auction, made a personal appearance after the sale. Holding court before a purple-clothed case displaying the 710-year-old document, he announced that he would return the manuscript to the National Archives where it had been on exhibit for the last 20 years on loan from Perot. Sotheby's heralded Rubenstein as having saved Magna Carta for America.

Redden described the sale as a high point in his 33-year career at Sotheby's and recalled that in the 1970s he and his fellow Sotheby's associates had created a board game. "We debated whether the star lot would be the Mona Lisa or the Magna Carta," said Redden after the auction. "We decided on the Magna Carta." Turns out that in today's market Magna Carta is more Marvin Gardens than Park Place.

--Kelly Devine Thomas

For all the anonymous 18th-century portraits that turn out to (maybe) be Titians, there are Gauguins that turn out to be exceptionally unattractive fakes. This week the Art Institute of Chicago announced that The Faun, in its collection for a decade, wasn't by Gauguin as it had surmised but was rather the product of a 47-year-old forger whose cohort parents had consigned it to Sotheby's in 1994.

While forger Shaun Greenhalgh was sentenced to serve four years and eight months in a British jail last month and his octogenarian parents await their fate, the museum reportedly is looking to Sotheby's for a refund. Perhaps its Board of Trustees will have better luck than these folks.

Sotheby's was involved in a bestial surprise of another kind last week when a limestone lioness from ancient Mesopotamia fetched a triple-estimate $57 million--the highest price ever paid at auction for a sculpture. Measuring just over 3 in. tall, the palm-sized figurine with killer deltoids and washboard abs was on loan to the Brooklyn Museum of Art for nearly sixty years by Alastair Bradley Martin, an amateur tennis champion and heir of steel magnate Henry Phipps. The mighty feline in a bodybuilder pose is said to have been found at a site near Baghdad and was acquired by Martin and his wife Edith in 1948.

Two holes in the back of its 5,000-year-old head suggest that it was worn 50 Cent-style around the neck of a powerful leader perhaps to repel misfortune and ward off evil forces. Or perhaps it was designed to attract renown and vast fortune: Sotheby's sold the purported amulet as The Guennol Lioness, adopting the Welsh name for Martin that graces the couple's formidable collection and their former estate.

--Kelly Devine Thomas

Apparently Russians have a love of money. Eliciting comparisons to Saudi high rollers of the 1970s and Japanese consumers of the 1990s, they shop for Gulfstream G550 airplanes and diamond-encrusted car grilles at modestly named shindigs. They also have a thing for cultural heritage and Faberge eggs.

Last week, Christie's and Sotheby's sold a combined $160 million worth of Russian artworks in London--a record haul that toppled previous highs. Among the highlights was a pink Faberge egg with a peek-a-boo diamond-set cockerel that sold for $16.5 million, a good bit of change more than the asking price of this ovoidal architectural wonder.

Goncharova's Bluebells

The world has been smitten with Russian collectors ever since an anonymous fellow with a bad dye job and apparently worse shoes mysteriously showed up at Sotheby's a year ago last May and plunked down $95 million for a Picasso. Today Russia claims some 53 billionaires and more than 100,000 millionaires, according to the New York Times. The nation also claims title to the most expensive female artist: Natalia Goncharova whose Picking Apples, sold for $9.8 million in June. Last week Goncharova's Bluebells fetched $6.2 million at Sotheby's, the top lot of its inaugural Russian evening sale. 

Vik Muniz

Vik Muniz

With its burgeoning scene of art-infatuated oligarchs (and their wives), art foundations, collecting clubs, art fairs, galleries, and private museums, Larry Gagosian paid a well-heeled visit to Moscow in the fall. Now Vik Muniz, who will render you and your significant other in Bosco chocolate syrup for $110,000 (thank Neiman Marcus) for the holidays, has rendered Russian icons in puzzle pieces and sand for an exhibition at Moscow's Gary Tatintsian Gallery. Must be love or something like it.

--Kelly Devine Thomas

Cai Guo-Qiang set a new record for a Chinese contemporary work at auction this week when a set of 14 drawings for Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) fetched a double-estimate $9.5 million. The drawings, which Cai created by igniting traces of gunpowder on large sheets of paper resulting in burn patterns and Cy Twombly-ish pockmarks, reference Cai's pyrotechnic performance at the 2001 APEC conference, attended by George W. Bush and then-Chinese chairman Jiang Zemin.

The work was the top lot of a quadruple-estimate $108 million sale at Christie's in Hong Kong--the kickoff of a five-day spending spree and the further rise of commerce and culture in China over communism and censorship.

Born in Quanzhou City, Fujian Province, China, in 1957, Cai first came to international attention during his years in Japan (1986-95) with his series "Projects for Extraterrestrials," with the aim of reaching distant galactic audiences but as far as we know confined to earthly attendees in locales like Berlin, Hiroshima, Johannesburg, Oxford, and Vienna. In 2002, an exhibition devoted to Cai's work at the Shanghai Art Museum crowned him the first contemporary artist to be granted a one-person show in a government-run art museum in China.

Now a resident of New York, Cai has left his imprint all over Manhattan with firework extravaganzas from Central Park to the East River. Early next year, the Guggenheim will exhibit the record-setting gunpowder drawings, which sold to an anonymous buyer, in "Cai Guo-Qiang: I Want to Believe." Museum-phobes might check out Cai's contribution to Beijing's opening and closing ceremonies at the upcoming Steven Spielberg-approved (maybe) Olympic spectacular.

--Kelly Devine Thomas

Phillips de Pury's November 15 evening sale was a fitting end to the $1.7 billion fall auction season, up from $1.4 billion six months ago and less than half that amount two years ago. The crowd was loud and restless, prompting the irrepressible Simon de Pury to shush them a half-dozen times (to no avail). Still, de Pury rode the audience like a first-rate jockey for three-plus hours, bringing in a mid-estimate $42.3 million and $8.2 million to benefit the New Museum. The top lot was Willem de Kooning's 1982 Untitled XVI, an orange, blue, and white Alzheimer's-afflicted aerial canvas, which fetched a tepid $5.8 million (estimate: $5/7 million).

de Kooning's 1982 Untitled XVI

By the end of the two-week marathon, buyers were distracted and boisterous--de Pury repeatedly used inflection and one-on-one direction to overcome the constant din of white noise that filled the Meatpacking District warehouse-cum-salesroom. "Would you like to continue?" a flushed de Pury queried one female bidder. "No? You wouldn't? That's very, very sad."

A delectable European openness and voyeurism pervade Phillips beyond the cheeky see-through partition separating the ladies from the gents in the underground restrooms. Newlyweds Amalia Dayan and Adam Lindemann, the widely reported seller of Jeff Koons's $23.5 million Hanging Heart at Sotheby's, canoodled in a center row, while jeweler Laurence Graff, who paid a combined $24 million for a soup-can picture and a double-image of Elvis Presley by Warhol earlier in the week, mingled and chatted as if bar-hopping with old friends.

(Over the weekend, the New York Times's Carol Vogel kind-a-sort-a reported
that Graff was the buyer of Koons's $11.8 million Diamond (Blue). She also named Damien Hirst as the buyer who paid $33 million for a 1969 Francis Bacon self-portrait; Eli Broad as the winner of Koons's Hanging Heart; and Steven Cohen as the buyer of Francis Bacon's $45.9 million picture of a bullfight.)

Larry Gagosian, who normally makes the round at Phillips, was nowhere to be seen, but Philippe Segalot carried on with his seasonal buying spree, winning a Styrofoam work with footprints by Rudolf Stingel
for an artists-record $1.9 million (estimate: $500/700,000).

Prince's 2002 Registered Nurse

Dealer Andrew Fabricant, spouse of Laura Paulson, Christie's international director for contemporary art, wanted Richard Prince's 2002 Registered Nurse, but lost it to a phone bidder for $4.2 million (estimate: $1.5/2.5 million). Another Prince work dating from 2001 and aptly titled What Can You Do? (estimate: $1.5/2 million) failed to find a buyer when art adviser Kim Heirston was unable to connect with a client on her cell phone.

Eder's 2006 Masturbating Woman Surrounded by Bad Towels

The slim and seemingly proper de Pury displayed his trademark resolve when it came to Martin Eder's 2006 Masturbating Woman Surrounded by Bad Towels. Whereas Christie's Christopher Burge might have smirked and Sotheby's Tobias Meyer might have teased, de Pury unabashedly spanked the title across the room for $157,000.

--Kelly Devine Thomas

It was bound to happen and it did thanks in large part to dealer Larry Gagosian. Jeff Koons usurped Damien Hirst as the most expensive living artist at auction on November 14 thanks to a two-ton suspended hot pink Hanging Heart for which Gagosian paid a record $23.5 million (estimate: $15/20 million). At least Gagosian had competition from two phone bidders for the work unlike the lackluster response to the artist's Diamond (Blue) at Christie's the night before. Both Koons and Hirst belong to Gagosian's stable of what might be described as most-expensive-living-artists-in-waiting. Gagosian also bid Koons's 2001 Pancakes up to $3.3 million before letting a phone bidder have it for $3.4 million hammer, a record for a painting by Koons with buyer's premium ($3.8 million).

Koons's Hanging Heart

But enough about Gagosian, who also paid $2.3 million for Warhol's 1962 Campbell's Beef Noodle (Crushed) (estimate: $1.2/1.8 million). He wasn't the only bidder with deep pockets in the room. Philippe Segalot, restless in his chair and armed with his cell phone, won the top lot of the sale and the season--Francis Bacon's 1969 Second Version of Study for Bullfight No. 1--for $45.9 million (estimate: $35 million-plus), Andy Warhol's 1978-79 Shadow for $7.6 million (estimate: $4.5/6.5 million), and Robert Ryman's 1981 Sector for $4 million (estimate: $2.5/3.5 million). Segalot has a charmingly insistent way of raising his paddle before the hammer comes down--as if signaling the auctioneer that he's not going to take no for an answer.

Francis Bacon's Second Version of Study for Bullfight No. 1

The phone banks took on the air of a tower of Babel as specialists speaking in hushed voices and multiple languages attempted to coax bids from telephone clients and kept them apprised of the action in the room. "$1 million against us; would you like $1.1 million?"

From the front row Valentino unsuccessfully tried to win Warhol's 1986 Self Portrait (Green Camouflage), which sold for a high-estimate $12.3 million, and Mark Rothko's 1968 Untitled, which fetched a double-estimate $7.8 million and whose color scheme matched the peacocked hair of Marc Jacobs, also seated in the front row, and a regular at this week's sales. Gina Gershon strode out of the salesroom in a long black leather coat and Louboutin booties towards the end of the sale.

By the end of the night, Sotheby's had sold 65 of the 71 works on offer and racked up $315.9 million, its highest sales total in its 263-year history. Tobias Meyer, sporting his signature double-breasted suit, nipped and tucked to suggest six-pack abs, stuck around for the post-sale press conference this time, pronouncing the firm's unprecedented sale results "evidence of the hunger that exists across a global community of buyers."

It appears that the sky's still the limit for the art market and particularly for Koons (literally). Next Thursday, a 53-foot tall rendition of his 1986 Rabbit will debut in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. Koons has described his stainless steel cast of an inflatable bunny as "a symbol maybe of the Resurrection, of the Playboy bunny, of masturbation." Quite a heady holiday combination.

--Kelly Devine Thomas   

About a week ago the New York Times ran an article about cognitive dissonance describing how the first evidence of rationalizing irrational behavior has been found in monkeys. Turns out that simians are able to convince themselves they have made the right choice, much like the collectors and dealers who showed up at Christie's on November 13 and spent a collective $325 million--the second highest auction total in the field--in under two hours.

The crowds were out in full force for the occasion and successfully shook off any doubt about the health of the art market after last week's tumultuous results. Sarah Jessica Parker teetered around in a strapless black dress. Marc Jacobs, his shorn hair dyed a cobalt blue and purple, took in the performance with an arched eyebrow from start to finish. By lot 12, eight artist's records had been broken, sparking repeated bouts of applause from the audience. Fifty-one of the 67 lots on offer sold for more than $1 million, prompting one dealer to offer the Times an exuberant soundbite: One million dollars is the new $10 grand.

Despite the celebratory mood and standout prices for Lucian Freud, Richard Prince, Ed Ruscha, and Mark Rothko (a red, blue, and orange canvas from 1955 fetched an above-estimate $34.2 million), there were several indicators that the market is not quite as ebullient as it appeared a few months ago. Several top-end works failed to meet their estimates but broke records regardless. Jeff Koons's Diamond (Blue), with an unpublished estimate of $20 million, was saved from near-failure by a sole bidder--dealer Larry Gagosian, who has been funding and selling the artist's Celebration series, including the giant blue bauble. Gagosian paid an artist's record $11.8 million to reclaim it. Gerhard Richter's 1963 Dusenjager likewise attracted limp bidding, selling for an artist's record $11.2 million against a $10/15 million estimate.

Freud's Ib and her husband, 1992

Warhol's Liz, 1963

de Kooning's Untitled XXIII, 1977

At the beginning of the sale, auctioneer Christopher Burge disclosed that interested parties might be bidding on six lots in the sale, including Freud's 1992 Ib and Her Husband, which sold for a record $19.3 million (unpublished estimate: $15 million-plus); Warhol's 1963 Liz, consigned by Hugh Grant who paid $3.5 million for it six years ago, which sold for $23.5 million (estimate: $25/35 million); and Willem de Kooning's 1977 Untitled XXIII, which fetched $19.9 million (estimate: $16/19 million). In other words, the works involved third-party guarantors, meaning the firm effectively pre-sold the work to an outside party who provided a guarantee to the seller in return for a portion of the winnings if the selling price exceeded the guaranteed sum. Third-party guarantees are controversial because the guarantor, whose identity is not disclosed, is permitted to bid on the work during the auction. If a third-party guarantor ends up winning the property for a price that exceeds the minimum guarantee, their share in the upside amounts to a decrease in the buyer's premium.

Cognitive dissonance indeed.

--Kelly Devine Thomas

It was a bad sign when Larry Gagosian didn't show up for Sotheby's November 7 sale of Impressionist and modern art and things only got worse from there. A stalwart Tobias Meyer, in a double-breasted suit so snug it could sub for crime-fitting attire (Batman came to mind), couldn't compensate for the lack of bidding in the room for the firm's aspiring blockbusters. Are we all done? It was a rhetorical question for which Meyer repeatedly needed no answer.

Sotheby's sale was proof that one less major bidder at an auction can make the difference between a record price and a buy-in (i.e., bombed to the point of not selling). So far the big bidders and buyers this season have been Franck Giraud and Phillipe Segalot, two former Christie's executives who went into business together six years ago. The leonine-maned Segalot is Francois Pinault's  primary art adviser. Shortly after Pinault's acquisition of Christie's in 1998, Segalot was appointed Christie's worldwide head of contemporary art while Giraud became international director of 19th and 20th century art.

Giraud, bidding for a client on his cell phone, was the underbidder (i.e., runner-up) of the record $33.6 million for Matisse's 1937 L'Odalisque, harmonie bleue at Christie's. At Sotheby's, Segalot persistently bid, at Giraud's nudging, on Egon Schiele's 1917 Self-Portrait with Checkered Shirt, against an unknown bidder whose silky coif rivaled John Edwards's. Segalot/Giraud ultimately won it for $11.4 million. The French duo also went on to win Picasso's enormous Tete de Femme (Dora Maar) sculpture for $29 million.

Among the major casualties of the night were Picasso's 1931 La Lampe (estimate: $25/35 million) and Van Gogh's 1890 The Fields (Wheat Fields) (estimate: $28/35 million). It can't help when the New York Times calls a work shopped around; not to mention a tough sell as was the case with Gauguin's 1892 Te Poipoi (Le Matin), which depicts a robust squatting Tahitian woman, apparently relieving herself, with her dress hiked up around her waist. The painting elicited only one phone bidder, Joseph Lau of Hong Kong, who paid $39 million (estimate: $40/60 million) for the work and requested that Sotheby's announce at the post-sale press conference that he was the buyer.

Gauguin's Te popoi (Le matin), 1892

In total, the Sotheby's sale achieved $269.7 million, nearly $100 million less than the sale's lowest expectation. Sotheby's Impressionist and modern co-chairman David Norman was loath to blame the results on the health of the market, chalking it up instead to over-aggressive estimates. "I am not at all ready to read the results as a correction of the market," Norman said at the press conference, from which Meyer was notably absent while newly minted Sotheby's exec Lisa Dennison wandered around looking stunning and stunned.

Van Gogh's The fields (Wheat Fields), 1890

Of the Van Gogh, for which the firm had offered a guarantee to the seller (meaning Sotheby's kind-a-sort-a already bought it), Norman remarked, "It's a great picture that we are prepared to own and be patient with."  In other words: anyone wanna buy a Van Gogh?

--Kelly Devine Thomas 

Christie's sale of Impressionist and modern art on November 6 was very big. There were 91 lots, which took the debonair and astutely alert Christopher Burge some 2.5 hours to magistrate. By lot 47 (Amedeo Modigliani's 1916 Portrait du sculpteur Oscar Miestchaninoff, which fetched a near-artist's record $30.8 million) I could barely keep the numbers straight--opening bids, increments, order bids, phone bids, saleroom bids, underbids, winning bids, not to mention paddle numbers.

It was about that time that I started fantasizing that there was a Christopher Guest script taking place behind the black curtained stage where men in white shirts and black aprons could be glimpsed placing and removing paintings from the turntable. Delusional thinking perhaps but it seemed like a ripe scenario for Eugene Levy.

Much of the audience must have felt the same way, as many of them made their exodus eight lots later with still nearly half of the sale to go. Nothing personal and par for the course--at auctions dealers and collectors (physically) move on when they've had their fill, they don't hang around out of a sense of politeness. This isn't church or the opera; the only decorum is to air-kiss your peers and pat each other on the back on your way out.

Matisse's L'Odalisque, harmonie bleue (1937)

Larry Gagosian hung on longer than most, taking his leave during lot 81 (a pedestrian Monet being sold by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art); he took home Picasso's Homme a la pipe for $16.8 million perhaps for a new Russian client. Christie's owner Francois Pinault stayed the course, looking down on the sale from a skybox window where he could be seen leaning into an outstretched arm as if he were trying to make a move on someone. Overall the crowd seemed unaffected (although perhaps secretly relieved) by the history-making potential of the event--the auction brought in $394.9 million, the second highest total in auction history, surpassing any of last season's offerings, and achieving record prices, including $33.6 million for Matisse's 1937 L'Odalisque, harmonie bleue. Big business CEOs might be dropping like flies, but the art market is still preening.

--Kelly Devine Thomas

Lisa Dennison, former director of the Guggenheim in New York, is now firmly ensconced at Sotheby's, and superdealer Larry Gagosian is back from last month's attempt to woo Russian clients in a Moscow mall. The scene may have changed somewhat since Christie's and Sotheby's boasted record-breaking sales in New York last May, but auction specialists expect that the two-week New York marathon of back-to-back Impressionist, modern and contemporary sales, which gets underway this week, might result in close to $2 billion worth of art trading hands.

The fall New York auction season arrives after a Grand Tour summer for the art world, which might have blissfully ignored the subprime mortgage disaster had it not been for its knee-buckling effect on hedge funds. Thank goodness for petroleum profits and the draw of a weak dollar.

Femme accroupie au costume turc (Jacqueline)

In order to secure eight-figure trophy consignments by Gauguin, Van Gogh, Matisse, and Picasso, this season Christie's and Sotheby's reportedly issued $1 billion worth of guarantees, an undisclosed sum promised to a seller regardless of the outcome of the sale, kind of like buying a horse and betting on it. According to a recent Sotheby's SEC filing, for the last 14 years guarantees (both parties typically participate in any excess above the promised sum) have proven to be a moneymaker.

Still, the markups on some works this season seem high. Two years ago Pissarro's Four Seasons, a suite of four landscapes, attracted a single bidder at Christie's who was willing to pay $8.9 million. This time around, Christie's produced a separate catalog for the paintings in addition to offering the seller a guarantee and a $12/18 million estimate. In light of the sale of Damien Hirst's Lullaby Spring, one of four pill cabinets belonging to Hirst's seasonal allegory, which reset the contemporary art world when it fetched 9.6 million pounds ($19.2 million) in London in June, perhaps the estimate will seem perversely modest to someone.

Next week the stakes get even higher. Christie's expects that the Warhol Liz that Hugh Grant paid $3.5 million for six years ago will fetch $25 to $35 million. (For a more affordable, albeit less illustrious Warhol, check out the artist's take on Conrad Black, being sold at Christie's day sale in order to help pay creditors of Black's former private company, Ravelston, Corp, Ltd, estimate: $100/200,000).

Reports of $100 million-dollar skull sales aside, both Christie's and Sotheby's are betting that Jeff Koons can surpass Hirst as the most expensive living artist at auction. Christie's is offering Diamond (Blue) and Sotheby's is selling Hanging Heart, two large-scale sculptures from Koons's mythic Celebration series, which purportedly set out to induce a sense of childhood wonderment and are estimated to fetch in excess of $20 million each.

Diamond (Blue)

Koons has said that he produced the Celebration series to communicate with his estranged son (now age 15) during a well-publicized custody battle during the early 1990s with his ex-wife, the Italian porn star Ilona Staller, known as La Cicciolina. In quizzically Koonsian fashion, the artist has described the four prongs surrounding the eight-foot-tall, seven-foot-wide Diamond as "sperm attacking an ovum. The facets of the diamond are the egg in the process of being fertilized." So much for innocence.

--Kelly Devine Thomas

Photo by Richard Lewis/WireImage.com

Phillips de Pury & Company is an interesting, surprisingly Page Six kind of company.  Last month its chairman Simon de Pury (right) joined forces with Charles Saatchi, a partnership that will bring art for free to the masses when the Saatchi Gallery opens next year.

The firm is nearly as old as Christie's and Sotheby's, founded in 1796 by Harry Phillips, former head clerk to Christie's founder James Christie. It went through an illustrious period—handling the estates of Beau Brummel, Marie Antoinette, and Napoleon—and boasts that it is the only auction house to have held a sale in Buckingham Palace. But by the end of the 20th century, it was better known as a regional auction house whose sales were more likely to be mentioned alongside Doyle, Swann Galleries, and Bonhams than Christie's and Sotheby's.

That all changed when Francois Pinault, head of Pinault-Printemps-Redoute (PPR), wrestled with Bernard Arnault, head of Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton (LVMH), over Gucci in 1999, provoking a run of one-upmanship that has been compared to the rivalry between Greek shipping tycoons Aristotle Onassis and Stavros Niarchos. Pinault won control of Gucci in 2001, and as of yet Arnault has been unable to trump him in the art world.

After an unsuccessful bid to acquire Sotheby's (Pinault has owned Christie's since 1998), Arnault successfully purchased Phillips in late 1999. A few months later Christie's and Sotheby's were facing price-fixing charges, and Arnault was making a ballsy attempt to upend the duopoly,  purchasing collections for auction outright and offering large guaranteed sums to win property. It was great for publicity; not so great for the bottom line.

Arnault's interest in the auction business was short-lived. He sold his majority stake in Phillips to de Pury & Luxembourg in 2002 and has since moved on to announce his own vanity museum to counter Pinault's Venice effect. Arnault had acquired the private Swiss dealership run by De Pury, past chairman of Sotheby's Europe, and his then partner, Danielle Luxembourg, former deputy chairman of Sotheby's Switzerland and Ronald Lauder confidante, in 2000.

Vanity Fair chalked up de Pury's appeal to "old-world charm and fastidiousness that borders on caricature." Apparently, when he greets women, he has a way of clicking his heels and kissing their hands—a routine that has won him many female admirers over the years." His ex-girlfriend Louise MacBain has apparently had a tough time getting over him. (He moved on to art and fashion extraordinaire Anh Duong.)

I'm not sure I see reason for heartache, but the always impeccably mannered and attired de Pury is fantastic at playing against type. Phillips, which has cornered the youth market by providing an edgy counterpoint to Christie's and Sotheby's loftiness, recently launched the interactive art site www.phillipsartexpert.com. There is something vulnerably appealing about seeing a virtual butler like de Pury inviting guests to play along in his clipped Swiss accent. Makes a girl almost want to root for him.

—KELLY DEVINE THOMAS

Two years ago New York hedge fund manager Rajiv Chaudhri, paid$1.6 million for Tyeb Mehta's Mahisasura (left) at Christie's, making it the first work by a contemporary Indian artist to surpass the $1 million mark. Since then, S.H. Raza and F. N. Souza have followed suit.

New Indian wealth both at home and abroad has elicited prices at auction dramatic enough to make one rethink Chinese contemporary art as the most promising Asian export. Now, with exhibitions of contemporary Indian art taking place all over the world and the art market's nascent endorsement, India has set out to build an international contemporary and modern art museum of its own, the Kolkata Museum of Modern Art (KMOMA), a project said to be inspired by the Tate Modern and earmarked for a world-renowned architect (Frank Gehry and Herzog and de Mueron have been reported to be among the contenders). The museum, a joint venture between the West Bengal government and private investors, including artists, gallery owners, and collectors, is expected to cost $150 million and five years to build.

On Tuesday, Sotheby's offered 84 artworks by nearly 70 artists, many of whom had donated their works to benefit the museum, including Jorgen Chowdhury, Somnath Hore, Ram Kumar, Ganesh Pyne, and Souza. Estimated to tally as much as $3 million, the auction brought in just half of that sum—$1.5 million.

Despite some notable failures--the star of the sale, Mehta's Kali Head (Green), failed to sell against a $400/600,000 estimate—current market strength was reflected in some of the results. Rameshwar Broota's Untitled fetched a double-estimate $300,000, while Arpita Singh's Classified File went for $204,000, exceeding it's top estimate by more than $50,000. Keep Cooking II, a bright red steel sculpture by Venice Biennale exhibitor Riyas Komu sold for a mid-estimate $14,400. Subodh Gupta's bronze and chrome accoutrements, meanwhile, fetched an above-estimate $78,000. Dubbed the Damien Hirst of Delhi, Gupta preempted Hirst last year, creating Very Hungry God (above), a giant skull rendered in stainless steel pots and utensils before Hirst opted for diamonds. Owned by Christie's proprietor Francois Pinault, the work is currently on exhibit outside Pinault's Palazzo Grassi in Venice. No security guards required.

—KELLY DEVINE THOMAS

Auction experts often describe their business as being dependent on three Ds: death, debt, and divorce. In recent years, they might add restitution.

Last week Christie's held the second of three sales of property restituted to the heirs of Amsterdam dealer Jacques Goudstikker. The heirs waged an eight-year legal battle before the Dutch government agreed last year to return 202 paintings in its national collections, including Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum. So far the Goudstikker works have brought in $16 million. Part three of the collection will be auctioned at Christie's in Amsterdam in November. And that may not be the end of it. The heirs continue to search for hundreds of works that are still missing from the collection.

Restitution is big business. Many of the most valuable works of art at auction in recent years have been restituted objects previously in museum collections. Both Christie's and Sotheby's have departments dedicated to restitution and provenance research. Museums have been scouring their collections for works with unclear wartime ownership. And websites all over the world  (including one assisted by Sotheby's) now host lists of art objects that might rightfully belong to the heirs of Holocaust victims.

Last year, cosmetics heir and Neue Galerie founder Ronald lauder paid $135 million for Gustav Klimt's (top) Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907), one of five Klimt paintings on display in Vienna's Belvedere Gallery that Austria returned to the heirs of Austrian sugar industrialist Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer. The remaining four Klimts were sold at Christie's last November, bringing in an astounding $192 million and resulting in the highest total —$491 million—for an auction. At the sale, Lauder bought another restituted artwork, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's Berlin Street Scene (it will be on exhibit at New York's Neue Galerie July 26-September 17), which had hung in Berlin's Brücke Museum for 30 years, for a record $38 million.

Sotheby's has also handled a number of high-profile restituted works. In 2003, the firm sold Gustav Klimt's Landhaus am Attersee, previously in Vienna's Belvedere Gallery, for $30 million, and Egon Schiele's Landscape at Krumau, a work that had been in the collection of the Neue Galerie in Linz, Austria, for $20 million.

It isn't just European museums that are giving up Nazi loot. Just last year, the Kimbell Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, agreed to restitute J.M.W. Turner's Glaucus and Scylla to the rightful heirs. When the painting appeared at Christie's in April, the museum reclaimed the work, paying $5.7 million for it.

—KELLY DEVINE THOMAS

R It wasn't so much a portrait as a means of introduction, kind of like posting your picture on myspace or wherever. In this case, Raphael had been commissioned to paint Lorenzo de' Medici, Duke of Urbino, for a portrait swap with his future bride-to-be. Lorenzo's uncle, Pope Leo X, arranged his marriage to Madeleine de la Tour d'Auvergne, a cousin of Francois I, King of France, and an important ally of the Vatican against the Holy Roman Empire.

Wedded bliss or not, it was New York dealer Ira Spanierman who scored big when he spotted the portrait at an auction forty years ago and paid $325 for it. Three years later, Renaissance scholars identified the work as a lost de' Medici portrait by Raphael. Last Thursday, it fetched an artist's-record £18.5 million ($37.3 million) at Christie's.

It wasn't the only work to fetch eight figures at the Old Master sales in London last week. Saint Rufina (above) sold for an artist's-record 8.42 million pounds ($17 million) at Sotheby's, becoming one of the top dozen Old Masters to ever sell at auction. (Check out Sotheby's ranking below.)

Maybe I can't get erotic connotations out of my head, but I'm not sure I understand why the plume in her hand is quite so big or the purpose of the vessel she is proffering. Reminds me of Meret Oppenheim's fur-lined teacup and makes me wonder what Freud would think.

But wait…Sotheby's provides an explanation for the seemingly gratuitous symbols: Saint Rufina was the daughter of a humble potter…during a pagan festival, she and her sister, Saint Justa, destroyed an image of Venus after refusing to make offerings to it…unwilling to renounce their faith, the sisters were tortured on a rack with iron hooks and starved and, in the case of Rufina, beheaded.

Yikes. It's a martyr's palm.

TOP OLD MASTER PAINTINGS SOLD AT AUCTION  BY DOLLAR (alternative ranking by British pound in parentheses)

1. (1) SIR PETER PAUL RUBENS
MASSACRE OF THE INNOCENTS
$76,730,700 (£49,506,650)
SOTHEBY'S LONDON, JULY 2002

2. (5)  RAPHAEL
PORTRAIT OF LORENZO DE' MEDICI
$37,277,500 (£18,500,000)
CHRISTIE'S LONDON, JULY 2007

3. (2) JACOPO PONTORMO
PORTRAIT OF  HALBERDIER
$35,200,000 (£22,278,481)
CHRISTIE'S NEW YORK, MAY 1989

4. (4) CANALETTO
VENICE, THE GRAND CANAL LOOKING NORTH-EAST FROM PALAZZO BALBI
$32,568,600 (£18,600,000)
SOTHEBY'S LONDON, JULY 2005

5. (7) JOHANNES VERMEER
YOUNG WOMAN SEATED AT THE VIRGINALS
$30,006,650 (£16,245,600)
SOTHEBY'S LONDON, JULY 2004

6. (3) REMBRANDT
PORTRAIT OF A LADY, AGED 62
$29,167,755 (£19,803,750)
CHRISTIE'S LONDON, DECEMBER 2000

7. (6) ANDREA MANTEGNA
DESCENT INTO LIMBO
$28,568,000 (£17,666,450)
SOTHEBY'S NEW YORK, JANUARY 2003

8. (8) REMBRANDT
SAINT JAMES THE GREATER
$25,800,000 (£13,656,574)
SOTHEBY'S NEW YORK, JANUARY 2007

9. (9) CANALETTO
THE BUCINTORO AT THE MOLO, VENICE, ON ASCENSION DAY
$19,990,250 (£11,423,000)
CHRISTIE'S LONDON, JULY 2005

10. (11) CANALETTO
THE OLD HORSE GUARDS, LONDON, FROM ST. JAMES PARK
$17,799,230 (£10,100,000)
CHRISTIE'S LONDON, APRIL 1992

11. (12) VELAZQUEZ
SAINT RUFINA
$17,003,348 (£8,420,000)
SOTHEBY'S LONDON, JULY 2007

12. (10) FRANCESCO GUARDI
VEDUTA DELLA GIUDECCA ET DELLA ZATTERE A VENEZZIA
$15,866,500 (£10,112,492)
SOTHEBY'S MONACO, DECEMBER 1989

—Kelly Devine Thomas

If I could do anything tomorrow morning, something other than sitting in my office nursing a lukewarm coffee deciding which rock-skipping tasks I should tackle next, I might make my way to Christie's.

It would be a breezy, crystal blue kind of morning and before entering Christie's headquarters at Rockefeller Center between Saks Fifth Avenue and Radio City Music Hall, I would watch a bunch of beautifully or at least compellingly or perhaps just confidently dressed people going about their weekday business in the company of others without necessarily being in the company of others.

Just before 10 a.m., I would take my place at Christie's "Open House" sale of postwar and contemporary art and if the estimates were spot on it would cost me as much as a Kobold watch, these Bang & Olufsen speakers or, at the very high end, this Hermès leather desk set to acquire my heart's desire. Maybe I would bring someone along to share my bungled attempt at raising my first paddle. Maybe I would be alone. I would most certainly be in the mood to bring something home.

Among the possibilities: Brian Alfred's Untitled (Racetrack) (estimate: $4/6,000); Vik Muniz's (below) portrait of Mr. Rogers, 2000 (estimate: $8/12,000); a pair of Tony Oursler Stimorol chewing gum and Camel Filters watercolors (estimate: $2/3,000); Robert Rauschenberg's (top) All Abordello Doze 1 (estimate: $30/40,000); James Rosenquist's Drawing #10 for Heart Time Flowers (estimate: $8/12,000); Donald Sultan's August 1977 (estimate: $7/9,000); and James Turrell's Roden Crater—Fumarole Entrance, 1983 (estimate: $12/18,000).

Initially, I might only allow myself to bid on something if someone else bid on it first.  If I felt like the crowd was a bit distracted or misguided or if I was really smitten (if I could feel how it would feel to live with it and if that feeling would be happiness; if it unexpectedly drew me in and made me feel connected and elevated; or if it simply provoked or amused me to a significant degree), I would make the first move and not worry about the consequences. If someone else came along and tried to have it, I would be faced with two options: letting it go or losing my mind over it. If I could do anything tomorrow morning, I might like to lose my mind over something before heading off into the sunshine.

—KELLY DEVINE THOMAS

Sotheby's described the sale as one of the finest collections of watercolors by Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851) to have come to the market in living memory, somehow suggesting that the works had been squired away in a baron's castle for at least a lifetime. In actuality the works weren't entirely fresh to the market. Baron Ullens spent the last two decades pulling the collection together, buying some of them at auction as recently as five years ago. On Wednesday, the fourteen works sold for 10.76 million pounds  ($21.74 million) altogether, short of its low estimate sans buyer's commission and just over half the record $35.8 million Steve Wynn spent to acquire a Turner oil painting of Venice last year.

The highest price paid for a watercolor on Wednesday was 3.6 million pounds ($7.26 million) for Turner's A Swiss Lake, Lungernzee, not quite approaching the 5.8 million pounds ($11.4 million), a record for any watercolor, paid for Turner's The Blue Rigi: Lake of Lucerne, Sunrise (below), at Christie's last June. Earlier this year, Tate Britain launched a public appeal that successfully saved The Blue Rigi for the country, after the government temporarily refused an export permit to Christie's foreign buyer, giving the nation until March 20 to come up with a reduced purchase price of 4.95 million pounds. Over 11,000 people donated 550,000 pounds—some "buying a brushstroke" (make that a pixel) online for 5 pounds each—to keep the watercolor in a public British collection.

Britain's most expensive artist until Francis Bacon's Study from Innocent X (1962) set a $52.6 million record at Sotheby's in May, Turner left the contents of his studio, 19,000 watercolors, drawings and oils, to Britain upon his death in 1851, including risqué images that The New York Times assures us were not destroyed in a bonfire in 1858.

Tate Britain will loan 86 works that were part of the Turner bequest to the National Gallery of Art in Washington this fall (October 1, 2007 - January 6, 2008) for what the museum is calling the largest and most comprehensive Turner retrospective ever presented in the United States, ostensibly outshining the retrospective accorded to the artist at the Museum of Modern Art in 1966. The U.S. Turner exhibition was postponed two years ago because of the enormity of the $1 billion-plus cost to insure it.

The retrospective, which will travel to the Dallas Museum of Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, promises to offer a new look at the eccentric pioneer of Romanticism and major influence on impressionism and modern art. A lifelong bachelor who fathered two daughters, scribed long poetic titles for his compositions, and bolstered paint with spit and snuff, Turner claimed that he had himself tied to the mast of a ship for four hours in a howling storm in order to experience the drama of the sea. Perhaps fittingly, Britain's most controversial tribute to the painter of light is the Turner Prize, that great whipping post of contemporary English society.

—KELLY DEVINE THOMAS

Yue Minjun became the most expensive Chinese contemporary artist last month when  The Pope (1997) sold for $2.15 million pounds ($4.28 million) at Sotheby's in London. In his portrayal of the Pope, a Western figure depicted by Western artists like Diego Velazquez, Francis Bacon, and Maurizio Cattelan, Minjun conveys a stereotypical Western vision of Chinese people: squinty eyes; full-frontal smile; ill-fitting clothing.

The record price fetched for Minjun's The Pope, is the latest demonstration that money (aside from Charles Saatchi's) is being drawn to Chinese art. Christie's spring auctions in Hong Kong brought in $195.4 million in May, including $1.78 million for Emperor Kangxi's (1662-1722) throne, which was bought by Macau casino mogul Stanley Ho. Last week, Ho paid $5.37 million for five works of Hong Kong "reunification" art and announced his plans to donate the works to the Chinese government. The highlight of the sale was Ma Baozhong's 19 December, 1984, commemorating the date then-British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher transferred ownership of Hong Kong back to China from Britain in 1984. Ho paid $2.19 million for it.

A year ago April, Ho's Macau casino mogul competitor Steve Wynn, the infamous mastermind who brought Cezanne, Matisse, and Picasso to Las Vegas a decade ago, paid more than $10 million for a Ming vase at Christie's Hong Kong and donated it to a Macau museum. This Wednesday, Belgian collector Baron Guy Ullens is selling his collection of 14 watercolors by J.M.W. Turner at Sotheby's in London (combined estimate: $19.7/29.55 million) as he focuses on establishing a center for Chinese contemporary art in a vast Bauhaus structure in Beijing. Ullens's Turner sale comes a year after Wynn paid a record $35.8 million for a Turner oil painting of Venice at Christie's in New York. Reminds me of the Warholian observation that Sotheby's London used as a press release logo last month: "Big time art is big time money." It's also big time publicity.

—KELLY DEVINE THOMAS

If you want to see something that's still somewhat erotically shocking, check out this video above, depicting naked young women smothering themselves in paint, pressing their bare torsos against a hanging canvas, and dragging each other around by outstretched arms across a canvas-covered floor. The tuxedo-clad maestro in the middle projecting this sensuously subversive bravado is French artist Yves Klein accompanied by an orchestra and an audience of prudently dressed women and men. Makes Damien Hirst seem almost modest.

Klein spent eight years (1954-1962), before dying of a heart attack at age 34, upending the artist's relationship to art and art's relationship to its audience. Before Warhol, Klein advocated the idea of the artist not as a machine but as a shaman capable of infusing space and objects with his aura. Artistic touch was not relevant; artistic conveyance was what Klein was after.

A judo black belt, Klein used female models as brushes; blanketed naked skin, sponges, and canvas with his patented International Klein Blue in the name of immaterial enlightenment; sold invisible paintings in an empty gallery; and asserted that the identical IKB monochrome paintings in his 1957 Picasso-tagging exhibition L'Epoca Blu (The Blue Period), were each priced differently. (According to Nan Rosenthal, while Klein told critics during and after the show that the prices were discordant, each painting in actuality was priced identically at 35,000 lire or about $56.)

A perpetual showman, Klein called his material oeuvre the "ashes of his art." Still, Klein likely would have been pleased with the results of last month's auctions in London. Two monochrome paintings nearly identical in size, identical in color and content, and painted a year apart, sold for different prices. IKB 94 (1959) (at right) fetched $2.9 million at Christie's, while IKB 170 (1960) garnered $2 million at Sotheby's. Turns out that even without his continued orchestration, Klein was onto something after all. There are plenty of reasons why artworks fetch the disparate prices they do, many of them (previous ownership, exposure, opinion, and salesmanship) having nothing to do with the physical work of art itself but rather the various auras that have attached themselves to it, beginning with the artist's.

-- KELLY DEVINE THOMAS

See Peter Beard's take on Klein style body painting here.

Oh, now he's going to be impossible to live with.

Damien Hirst, enfant terrible, became the most expensive living artist at auction last week (unlike with Peter Doig note the absence of a European modifier). With Larry Gagosian, Jay Jopling, and a diamond-studded $100 million skull in his corner, it almost makes one want to shout foul.

But there's no arguing with records. They are what they are. People set them. People break them -- breathtakingly quickly nowadays. Since the dawn of artistry, artists have succeeded in the market because of the patrons in their corner. In this case, patronage helped the 42-year-old figurehead of the Young British Artists dethrone American iconoclast Jasper Johns, 77, who'd held the record at auction for a living artist since 1989 when publisher S.I. Newhouse paid $17.1 million for the artist's False Start (1959). (This record was improved upon in May when Gagosian paid $17.4 million for Johns's Figure 4 (1959) at Christie's.) Newhouse subsequently sold False Start to entertainment mogul David Geffen, who sold it last year to hedge-fund manager Kenneth Griffin for a reported $80 million.

Modern-day patronage also helped Hirst trump the most-expensive-living-European-artist-at-auction record set by the 84-year-old School of London painter Lucian Freud, grandson of Sigmund Freud and portraitist of the Queen, when his depiction of the late Bruce Bernard sold for 7.86 million pounds ($15.6 million) at Christie's the night before.

Lullaby Spring, the work that reset the contemporary art world when it fetched 9.6 million pounds ($19.2 million) at Sotheby's London on June 21, is one of four pill cabinets belonging to Hirst's take on that allegorical mainstay, the Four Seasons. The stainless steel cabinet contains 6,136 Easter-hued pharmaceuticals (unlike the 8,601 diamonds used for his high-security skull, the pills are hand-painted bronze placebos). In May, its more despondent counterpart, Lullaby Winter, summoned a record $7.4 million at Christie's.

Despite Hirst's coup, it was Freud's late buddy Francis Bacon who was the undisputed star of the recent auction sales of Impressionist & Modern and Contemporary & Postwar art in New York and London, which fetched nearly $2.5 billion altogether at Christie's, Sotheby's, and Phillips de Pury, including day sales.

Two paintings by Bacon alone racked up nearly $100 million in May and June. Bacon's 1978 Self Portrait (at right) fetched 21.58 pounds ($43 million) last week, the second highest price for the artist. His Study from Innocent X (1962) set a $52.6 million record at Sotheby's in New York just last month. All of which makes one wonder about Venice Biennale director Robert Storr's recent observation, "'Money talks but generally, when it comes to art's substance, it doesn't have much to say."' Maybe, but it sure does move it.

-- KELLY DEVINE THOMAS

What does it mean when a Monet bought in 1990 for $3.4 million returns to the market and makes $35.5 million? Ma