A group of 11 early works by Yayoi Kusama from the late 1950s and early ’60s that have been in private hands for six decades sold on Wednesday for a collective $15.2 million—almost double the pre-sale expectation of $8.8 million—at Bonhams during a postwar and contemporary art sale in New York.

The trove consists of three paintings and eight works on paper that Kusama gifted to the late Japanese cardiovascular surgeon Teruo Hirose in exchange for medical care. Bidders from China, the Middle East, Europe, and the United States competed to buy the works, according to a Bonhams spokesperson.

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There’s a funny thing that happens in the private art market that really isn’t very funny when it happens to you. Because the best art is rarely for sale publicly—and because art buying is too much like being on a treasure hunt—it isn’t uncommon for someone to approach a collector known to have work by an in-demand artist and claim to have a serious buyer for it. After some blandishments and extravagant promises, the “runner,” as a person in that position is known in the trade, secures an image of the work supposedly only for that exclusive client.

In truth, there is no client. But the enterprising runner, knowing there’s a hot market for the artist, starts shopping it around to advisers and private dealers. The runner will take it to directors at some of the important galleries that make money from secondary market sales. As the chain of interested intermediaries extends, eventually someone gets the bright idea of offering the work to a collector who has been known to buy that artist’s work before. Lo and behold, the original collector gets a text and an image offering her the work she already owns.

It’s funny—but infuriating.

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A 1917 watercolor by Egon Schiele that was recently restituted by Colonge’s Museum Ludwig will be sold during Sotheby’s Impressionist and modern art evening sale on May 12 in New York. It is expected to fetch a price of $2.5 million–$3.5 million and is being offered with a guarantee.

Schiele’s Kauernder weiblicher Akt (Crouching Female Nude) depicts a kneeling nude woman, and had been in the collection of the Museum Ludwig since 1976. It was returned to the heirs of Heinrich Rieger, the work’s original owner, last month. A German commission issued a formal recommendation for the work’s restitution after Rieger’s heirs made a claim for it.

“We are now grateful to the Commission for this unanimously adopted recommendation. We also thank the heirs of Dr. Heinrich Rieger for their patience and are relieved that with the return of the work to the family a just and fair solution has now been found,” said the museum’s director, Yilmaz Dziewior, in a statement to ARTnews.

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