Colin Gleadell recently published an article in the Telegraph UK on Sotehby's London holding its first specialty sale of Czech modern art. This appears to be the first Czech art speciality sale to be held outside of central Europe. Sotheby's will be offering approximately 200 lots and expects the sale to total in the $8 million range.
Gleadell reports
To read the complete article in the Telegraph, click HERE.While some of the better known Czech artists, Frantisek Kupka for instance, were part of the blossoming of modern art in Paris at the beginning of the 20th century and command six-figure prices in the international Impressionist and Modern art sales, most gravitated around Prague, and have been considered mainly of local interest.
Over the past decade, however, prices for these artists, who were connected to the Cubist, Expressionist or Surrealist movements, have increased as buyers from the former Czechoslovakia began to repatriate works to form collections. At the same time, Western collectors have also shown interest in what is a comparatively undervalued market.
A classic example is Norman and Suzanne Hascoe, from Greenwich, Connecticut, whose collection is to be sold next week. Hascoe was an engineer who launched a company developing advanced semiconductor materials in 1957 with a capital investment of $8,000. In 1983, he sold his business for $100 million.
Some time after the fall of communism in Czechoslovakia in 1989, Norman Hascoe was travelling in Eastern Europe with his wife, Suzanne, and visited the National Gallery in Prague, where they were bowled over by the early 20th-century Czech art they saw there. The two had a broad interest in art, but it was the Czech collection they then began to amass that was most distinctive.
No comments:
Post a Comment