From Manet to Manhattan: The Rise of the Modern Art Market - Hardcover

Watson, Peter

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679404724 ISBN 13: 9780679404729

Publisher: Random House, 1992

Synopsis

A behind-the-scenes look at the world's art market reveals the art connoisseurs, collectors, artists, dealers, and auction houses that have shaped tastes in art and created record-breaking sales for art masterpieces. 25,000 first printing. $35,000 ad/promo.

About this title

About the Author:

Peter Watson was educated at the universities of Durham, London and Rome. He has spent most of his life in newspapers, as a correspondent or an editor for the Sunday Times, The Times and the Observer, where he writes a weekly column on the art market. He has also written for the Spectator and is a contributor for the New York Times. In 1983, after posing as an international art dealer, he exposed a ring of art theives and smugglers moving stolen paintings from Italy to America. His investigation resulted in four people being convicted. His account, The Carvaggio Conspiracy was awarded a Gold Dagger by the British Crime Writers' Association. It was dramatised by the BBC, and nominated for an 'Emmy'. He has since published four thrillers set in the art world. Peter Watson lives in London and the south of France. His recreations are fishing, cricket and opera.

From Publishers Weekly:

Watson's colorful, anecdotal history of the development of the modern art market opens with his behind-the-scenes account of the 1990 Christie's auction that saw the sale of a van Gogh portrait for a record $82.5 million. His theme--that auctioneers and dealers have shaped the art market as arbiters of public taste--receives sporadic support, as in his account of the New York Armory Show of 1913 or a discussion of dealer Siegfried Bing, "godfather of Art Nouveau." Art critic for the London Observer and the Spectator, Watson entertainingly covers art scandals, big deals and changing fashions, profiling such dealers as Ambroise Vollard, Daniel Wildenstein and the notorious Joseph Duvenn as well as collectors such as Gertrude Stein, Isabella Stewart Gardner and Louisine Havemeyer. He airs the fierce current rivalry between Sotheby's and Christie's and suggests that much of the recent art boom was artifically generated, involving shady purchases by Japanese buyers who used art to launder money for Japan's political parties, corporations and organized crime. Illustrations not seen by PW. First serial to Vanity Fair; author tour.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 0679404724
• ISBN 13: 9780679404729
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 558