Record $13.4M paid for medieval art works

Press, 24 June 1978, Page 8

Record $13.4M paid for medieval art works

XZPA London i j Medieval works of art I j from the Robert von Hirsch ! collection brought record ; prices on Thursday with one ! single session netting $13.4 ! million — the biggest single | auction session in history. ■ Sotheby’s had estimated that I the whole eight-dav auction ■would fetch above $14.4 million. I The prices ran so high 'that one world record was : set, then broken, then ibroken again in the same ! session. Two items went for |more than $2 million each. Among the buyers paying ■ I record prices was the Cleve- ■ land Museum of Art. which ■ j spent $487,800 for two mag-2 ; nificent ivory’ carvings, one 'dating from 1100 A.D. and! ■ showing knights jousting in : a tournament in panels from ■ a French Gothic casket. ' The medieval works of art ' — amassed over a 70-year-l period by a collector who ■ willed that his collection should be sold to “share the: l joys of ownership” — sold 11 for $11.78 million during the 1 morning and netted another < isl,6 million in the afternoon. ' One of the first records to go was for an early twelfth ■ < century English candlestick < base which sold for 1 ($925,000. This was an al!-<

i time auction record for a j work of art other than a painting — more than any 1 I Ming vase, Louis XVI furni- ■ ture. or golden treasure from Troy. Within minutes that price looked like peanuts. A London dealer paid I $2.4 million for a gilded (arm ornament, probably made in 1165 for the coronation robes of the Emperor Frederick 1 or Barbarossa, doubling the just-set record. Then, only moments later. Reiner Zietz, a Hannover dealer acting for the StaatI liche Museum in Berlin, i topped that. He paid $2.22 million for the “Mosan h I medallion,” an enamel! i plaque showing a winged :angel, made about 1150 for a. ishri ne. Mr Zietz set another'l (record by paying $101,750 for a Venetian glass beaker. ' or drinking glass. That was' 1 nearly 1000 per cent more i than the previous world auc- ' tion record for a piece of 1 Venetian glass. i A London dealer set a i new world auction record i for a bronze by paying ■ < $114,700 for a thirteenth- ' century jug shaped like a young man. i The sale brought the total 1 of the von Hirsch collection s thus far to $19.8 million. 1 The eight-day Mentmore t Towers sale, the previous r

’ record auction, made about i !$11.3 million. There are five von Hirsch sales still to I come, ending with spec- 1 tacular French impressionist ” auctions next Monday and 1 Tuesdav night. Sotheby’s say they don’t 1 know who the money is going to, but dealers sav it r will be divided among von 1 Hirsch family relatives, of whom quite a number are [ scattered around the globe. Fear of a new art-seeking ( Goliath from the United ' States is boosting prices at 1 the auction, sources at the 1 sale have said. ; They said that a settle- r 'ment of disputes over the.’ I will of American oil magnate J. Paul Getty, would set. free I the Getty Museum he founded in Malibu, California, to buy whatever it chooses. < Getty, reputedly the 1 world’s richest man,' died in r his English mansion at Sut- r ton Place on June 6, 1976, a without seeing the museum f he endowed with his fort- I une. The art-dealing frater- ? nity in London estimates the r museum could have an in- t come of up to $4O million a g year. “That’s why some of the t prices at Sotheby’s are so d frantic — everybody wants r something before the boys < from Malibu get to work,” s said a veteran of the salerooms.