New Records for Old Artists

Walter Robinson combs Artnet‘s auction database for new record prices achieved this Spring:

France-based Indian modernist Sayed Haider Raza ($3.45 million, for a 1932 abstraction, at Christie’s), for Swedish realist Anders Zorn ($3.3 million, for boating scene, at Stockholms Auktionsverk), and for 20th-century Korean modernist Lee Joong-Seop ($2.9 million, for an abstracted painting of a bull, at Seoul Auction).

Also on the list is second-tier Cubist Albert Gleizes ($2.7 million, at Christie’s London in its Impressionist sale), the Soviet Realist Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, the first president of the Leningrad Union of Artists in 1932 ($2.65 million, at Christie’s London Russian art sale), and the 19th-century Russian landscape painter Baron Mikhail Konstantinovich Klodt von Jurgensburg ($1.1 million, also at Christie’s London).

The Swiss painter Cuno Amiet — briefly a member of the Pont-Aven School in the late 1800s — had a new record, $1.48 million, for a Winterlandschaft from 1908, at Galerie Kornfeld, as did Carl Fredrik Hill, whose lovely Fruit Tree in Bloom from 1877 sold for $1.18 million at Bukowskis Stockholm.

And we mustn’t forget the great Victorian artist Herbert James Draper, whose record-setting The Sea Maiden (1894) so lasciviously classicises the folk tale of sailors catching a mermaid — here a simple nude, perhaps a siren — in their nets. It sold at Christie’s London for $1.38 million.