“I recount with pride many marvellous successes: the Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé sale at the Grand Palais in February 2009, the ground-breaking price achieved for the stone head by Modigliani in June 2010, still the most expensive work of art ever sold in France, and the 2016 cultural milestone when we orchestrated the private sale of two portraits by Rembrandt to leading institutions in France and the Netherlands.”
François de Ricqlès, the current president of Christie’s France, who will stand down in the summer of 2019 after 16 years with the company to set up an art advisory business.
“Is it a book you would have lying around in your own house? Is it a book that you would wish your wife or your servants to read?”
A question from the prosecution during the 1960 obscenity trial over DH Lawrence’s infamous novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The copy used by the judge who presided over the trial goes under the hammer at Sotheby’s this month.
“We didn’t know him, and he probably hadn’t heard of us, but great art transcends time and Frieze Masters lets that happen.”
Jorge Coll of Colnaghi on selling an Old Master painting to a first time buyers at a previous edition of Frieze Masters.
“The irony that such a beautifully decorated piece of wood was actually intended to thwack someone across the back of the head with the business end appealed to me so much that I began collecting them.”
Gavin Littaur who is selling part of his extensive collection of police truncheons and tipstaves at Canterbury Auction Galleries in Kent this week.
“The flood was an opportunity to downsize. We are maximising the space we now have and will focus on Chinese works of art in the rear part of the shop which is now our new entrance.”
Asian art dealer Kevin Page who has re-opened his Camden Passage shop following a flood that caused many dealers in Islington to close.
