#art-auctions

#art-auctions

If you want to sell Basquiats and Birkins to the very rich, it might help to have a location on Billionaires' Row. It might also help if that location had a certain cultural cachet. Bonhams, the international auction house, managed to find such a spread in a 42,000-square-foot space that is knitted from the lower floors of an odd collection of prewar buildings and razed lots, with pops of old brick walls and limestone interrupting expanses of sheer, contemporary glass.

"We are still in the early days of the so-called great wealth transfer," says the lawyer Pierre Valentin, the joint head of art law at Fieldfisher. "The wave started in the US with the sale of collections such as those of Sydell Miller, Mica Ertegun and more recently, Leonard Lauder. The wave is coming to Europe, for example with the auction of the collection of Pauline Karpidas [last] September. I expect that there will be many more of those 'white glove' sales in the next 10 to 15 years because younger collectors collect differently from their parents and grandparents."

Every year sees increasing interest in Vincent van Gogh, and this is a truly global phenomenon. The Dutch artist is now a megastar in East Asia-in China, Korea and Japan. Here, we review the Van Gogh year in 2025. The big surprise of the year was news that the Van Gogh Museum may have to close its doors unless the Dutch state provides more money to help look after its buildings.

"We treasure those pieces," she told the Washington Post. "They are integral to the character of the museum. They belong to the public. They are now probably going into private hands. It's just a shame."

The Kawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art, a private museum created on the outskirts of Tokyo in 1990, is cashing in on its collection of canonical Western Modernism. The museum, which was owned by the chemicals giant DIC Corporation and ceased operations at the end of March, has consigned its treasures to Christie's. They are collectively expected to bring in at least $60m across several sales this autumn in New York.

In a 2003 letter to Jeffrey Epstein, Donald Trump allegedly included a drawing of a naked woman, with pubic hair shaped from his signature, raising eyebrows.