James Stourton

Rogues and Scholars (eBook, ePUB)

Boom and Bust in the London Art Market, 1945-2000

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

The Times' Best Art Books of the Year, 2024
'A riot of a book' - Country Life's Books of the Year, 2024

The modern art market was born on a single night. On 15 October 1958 Sotheby's of Bond Street staged an 'event sale' of Impressionist paintings from the collection of an American banker, Erwin Goldschmidt: three Manets, two Cézannes, one Van Gogh and a Renoir. Movie stars and other celebrities attended in black tie and saw the seven lots go for £781,000 - at the time the highest price for a single art sale.

Overnight, London became the world centre of the art market and Sotheby's an international auction house. The event signalled a shift in power from dealers to auctioneers and pointed the way for Impressionist paintings to dominate the market for the next forty years. In this climate Sotheby's and Christie's became a great business duopoly - as aggressive, dominant and competitive in the field of art sales as Pepsi and Coca-Cola were in soft drinks. The resulting expansion of the market was accompanied by rocketing prices, colourful scandals and legal dramas. Over the decades, London transformed itself from a place of old master sales to a revitalised centre of contemporary art, a process crowned by the opening of Tate Modern in 2000.

James Stourton tells the story of the London art market from the immediate postwar period to the turn of the millennium in engaging and fast-paced style, populating his richly entertaining narrative with a glorious rogues' gallery of clever amateurs, eccentric scholars, brilliant emigrés, cockney traders and grandees with a flair for the deal.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Bloomsbury UK eBooks
• Seitenzahl: 448
• Erscheinungstermin: 12. September 2024
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781804541951
• Artikelnr.: 72250073

Autorenporträt

James Stourton is a British art historian, a former Chairman of Sotheby's UK and the author of Great Houses of London, British Embassies, and the authorized biography of Kenneth Clark. Stourton frequently lectures to Cambridge University History of Art Faculty, Sotheby's Institute of Education and The Art Fund, and is a senior fellow of the Institute of Historical Research. He also sits on the Heritage Memorial Fund, a government panel which meets to decide what constitutes heritage and should be saved for the nation.

Rezensionen

With panache and characteristically elegant penmanship, James Stourton throws open the doors to a riveting chapter in the history of art in which glamorous eccentricities, serious scholarship and a good deal of swindling cohabit... Stourton brings us a gripping and thoroughly researched chronicle of the post-war art market, punctuated with the occasional 'you couldn't make this up' moment. Rogues & Scholars is just as entertaining as it is educational.