The auction will be held in association with Pierre Berge & Associates, the Paris auction house owned by the fashion designer’s former business partner, Christie’s said today in an e- mailed statement. The specific date and contents of the sale have yet to be announced, said London-based Christie’s.

Saint Laurent died last month, aged 71. He and Berge, who co- founded the Yves Saint Laurent couture house in 1961, amassed a collection of artworks that is believed to be worth up to 300 million pounds ($599 million), according to the Art Newspaper.

It said their collection features works by a range of contemporary artists and Old Masters that includes Picasso, Warhol, Mondrian, Matisse and Goya.

(Scott Reyburn writes about the art market for Bloomberg News. Opinions expressed are his own.)

The post Christie’s to Sell Yves Saint Laurent Art Collection first appeared on Indian Art News.

With auction prices for contemporary art still somewhere in the stratosphere, it often felt like catch-up time at the Old Master sales in London last week.

The Misers was estimated at £100,000, but spiralled on trade competition to £2.1 million

Three drawings by Goya, for instance, unseen for more than 130 years, sold for a combined £4 million at Christie’s. One of them tripled an 11-year-old record for a work on paper by selling for £2.3 million.

Also at Christie’s, a small gem of a painting, La Surprise by Jean-Antoine Watteau, lost for 200 years until discovered in an English country-house attic, soared past the previous £2.4 million record for the 18th-century French artist to sell to the London dealer Luca Baroni, bidding for a collector, for £12.4 million. This was also a record for any 18th-century French artist, but still not quite as much as a bulbous Jeff Koons flower sculpture fetched a week earlier.

At Sotheby’s, the star of the sale was another rediscovery – a small but swaggering portrait of the textile merchant Willem van Heythuysen by the 17th-century Dutch painter Frans Hals. Although the painting was not a rediscovery, its authorship was.

Sold four years ago at auction in Vienna as a work by a “follower of Frans Hals” for £350,000, it has since been fully attributed to Hals, and sold for £7.1 million, just short of the record set by a much larger painting by the artist. It was bought by London-based Australian dealer Richard Nagy for, he says, someone who collects contemporary art. “It’s a wonderful painting,” said Nagy after the sale. “It was cheaper than some small portraits by Francis Bacon or Andy Warhol, and it’s a much rarer work by a 17th-century master. I thought it could go a lot higher.”

advertisementAnother contemporary-art buyer was after a splendidly modern-looking 17th-century composition, The Bad Shepherd by Pieter Brueghel the Younger, at Christie’s, and outbid Old Master dealer Johnny van Haeften to buy it for a double estimate £2.5 million.

The salerooms are always telling us how many new private buyers are coming into the market, and, yes, there may also have been some Russian bidding on a lustrous portrait by the 18th-century artist Pompeo Batoni of Count Kirill Grigorjewitsch Razumovsky, who rose from humble origins in the Ukraine to join the court of Empress Catherine II, which sold for a record £1.3 million.

A new American collector, one with a passion for horses no doubt, may also have bought a Stubbs horse painting in questionable condition for £337,250 and a painting of a rearing stallion, only recently given, but not without dispute, to the hand of Van Dyck, which sold for a record £3 million.

However, Old Master sales are still driven by a hard-core of knowledgeable dealers, bidding for stock. At Sotheby’s, which had the best selection of 17th-century Dutch paintings, Richard Green paid a record £3.5 million (nearly double the previous record) for a joyful riverside scene with dancing figures by Jan Brueghel the Elder. Van Haeften bought seven Dutch paintings in the sale, including an atmospheric scene of figures skating through a snow storm by Aert van der Neer for which he paid a record £2.7 million.

The big surprises, though, came for early Netherlandish and Italian paintings. The Misers, one of many known versions of Marinus van Reymerswaele’s 16th-century Tax Gatherers in the National Gallery, was estimated at £100,000, but spiralled on trade competition to £2.1 million because of the sheer quality of the paintwork rather than any supposition about who the artist may have been. A wonderfully expressive portrait of an elderly man by the 16th-century mannerist painter Tintoretto also soared to a five-times-estimate record £1.6 million, selling to dealer Baroni.

British art had its moments, too. At Christie’s, an oil sketch of the artist’s mother by Sir Thomas Lawrence, estimated at £40,000, sold to New York dealers French & Co for £373,250. A rare early painting by Turner, Pope’s Villa on the Thames at Twickenham, was perhaps too classical and reserved for today’s tastes and sold on its low estimate to a single bid from a private collector for £5.4 million at Sotheby’s. However, it was the second-highest price on record for an oil painting by Turner.

At the final count, the £100 million sales for the week was on a par with last year’s Old Master sales, revealing a discriminating but robust market at work, but still a long way short of the £260 million realised a week earlier for contemporary art.

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