Sotheby’s failed to sell three of the top diamonds offered in a Geneva auction of jewels following a five-week decline in prices for such gems.
Sotheby’s had put stones up for sale such as a 10.48 carat flawless deep blue diamond valued at $6 million to $9 million. The top price for an item at the sale was $1.3 million for an 8 carat pink diamond ring, said an e-mailed statement sent late yesterday.
Three contemporary-art sales in New York last week disappointed art dealers by failing to reach their estimated revenue, raising concern among auction houses that demand for high-price goods may be wavering. The Rapaport Diamond Trade Index dropped 9.4 percent in the five weeks through Nov. 18.
“The diamond market is currently in a phase of transition and it will probably not be clear where it is headed until the end of the year,” David Bennett, Sotheby’s chairman for its European and Middle Eastern jewelry business, said in the statement.
About 39 percent of the lots offered in the Sotheby’s auction went unsold. Sotheby’s said the sale totaled $14.8 million.
London-based Christie’s is holding a rival jewelry auction today in Geneva. (Bloomberg)

The unfashionable collecting category of Victorian art received a boost last night at Sotheby’s in London, when the collection of the late U.K. diplomat David Scott sold for 4.6 million pounds ($6.8 million) with fees.
Eighty-eight percent of the auction’s 242 lots found buyers. While the sale, with auction-house fees, missed its total presale estimate of 5 million pounds based on hammer prices, dealers said it was more successful than recent Victorian-art auctions.
Described by London dealer Rupert Maas as “the finest collection of Victorian narrative paintings left in private hands,” the works had been bought by Scott, a knight and World War I veteran, over several decades. Scott died in 1986 at the age of 99.
“We haven’t seen the galleries and the saleroom as full and busy for a Victorian picture sale for many years,” said Grant Ford, Sotheby’s specialist in charge of the auction, in an e- mailed statement.
A record 1 million pounds with fees was paid for Sophie Anderson’s sentimental 1850s oil, “No Walk Today,” showing an elaborately dressed little girl gazing dejectedly through a window at falling rain. The 19-inch-high canvas, bought by Scott in 1926, had been expected to fetch between 600,000 pounds and 800,000 pounds. The buyer was an anonymous bidder at the back of the saleroom who left immediately after making his purchase.
Ford said the collection had especially attracted attention from “our established clients in the U.K.”(Bloomberg)

Barnaby Furnas returns to Chelsea with new paintings of rock bands, Civil War heroes and post- apocalyptic landscapes.
There is no unifying theme in the artist’s fourth exhibition at the Marianne Boesky Gallery. His new show looks as if it were done by three different artists - or by one who is confused about how to move things forward following his early success.
Works by Furnas, 35, have attracted high-profile art collectors, including London-based advertising mogul Charles Saatchi, Hollywood agent Michael Ovitz and New York real estate developer Aby Rosen.
At auction, Furnas’s record of $520,000 was achieved in 2006 at Sotheby’s in New York, but recently many of his pieces failed to find buyers.
The Chelsea exhibition features three groups of paintings that explore mostly familiar themes. Furnas shows an ongoing preoccupation with death and historic figures; abolitionist crusader John Brown makes an appearance yet again.
The artist builds on his “flood” paintings, shown at the gallery two years ago, by covering their crimson-and-blue surfaces with black paint — and in some instances, by burning them with a torch. A black hole at the top center of each of these dreary landscapes replaces the glowing suns in the “flood” paintings. Given Furnas’s very specific, and often seductive, color sense, black is an unfortunate choice to display his skills.
The third group depicts rock concerts of such bands as the Misfits and the Pixies. “Pink Concert,” the first work visitors encounter, impresses with its dynamic, complex composition. The 7-by-9-foot canvas features a funky pink-and-black checkerboard palette, video-game-like musicians and disco balls.
In the next room, several other paintings from the group offer only the slightest variations, diluting their impact. (Bloomberg)

Paul W. Thompson, the director of the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, is stepping down to become the new rector, or president, of the Royal College of Art, London, the museum is expected to announce on Friday.
“It’s such a wonderful job in the art and design world, I really couldn’t say no,” Mr. Thompson said in an interview on Thursday.
The Cooper-Hewitt is part of the Smithsonian Institution. During his tenure, Mr. Thompson has overseen an effort to expand the museum’s Fifth Avenue Carnegie Mansion, a $64 million project that will create 70 percent more exhibition gallery space, a new library and, additional classrooms for the museum’s masters program. Mr. Thompson said the museum has completed 65 percent of the fundraising.
Mr. Thompson, who is British, will leave the Cooper-Hewitt in August 2009 and start his new position in September. He took over the Cooper-Hewitt in March 2001, having previously served as director of the Design Museum in London.
A search committee comprised of Cooper-Hewitt trustees, Smithsonian executives and members of the design community will be announced on Dec. 1.
The Smithsonian has been buffeted by controversy over the last two years; its former secretary, Lawrence M. Small, resigned in March 2007. G. Wayne Clough took over as secretary in July.
“That is a sadness,” Mr. Thompson said. “Not being able to benefit and enjoy the new leadership of Wayne Clough.” But he added, museum directors come and go. “That is very much the cycle of life,” he said. (The New York Times)

The Cleveland Museum of Art has agreed to return a total of 14 “looted” items to Italy, among them an Attic rhyton, or drinking vessel, in the shape of a donkey head, above, which dates from 475BC. Italy has persuaded other US museums such as the Metropolitan in New York to return dozens of artistic treasures that were “exported illegally”, according to Sandro Bondi, the Culture Minister. (Reuters)

Britain’s campaign to buy a 50 million pound ($75 million) Titian painting got a boost as the National Heritage Memorial Fund announced that it is giving 10 million pounds toward the purchase.
It was the biggest contribution so far. London’s National Gallery and the National Galleries of Scotland, or NGS, have until year’s end to raise the money for “Diana and Actaeon,” currently on loan to the nation from the Duke of Sutherland.
“This has completely transformed the campaign,” said National Gallery Director Nicholas Penny, as he stood before the painting of Actaeon chasing the bathing Diana. “Previously, I was pretending to be optimistic. Now I am genuinely optimistic.”
If enough cash is raised to buy the painting — one of two 16th-century works the Renaissance artist executed for Philip II of Spain — the two museums would then have the option to acquire, for a similar amount, another Titian, “Diana and Callisto,” by 2012. If both are bought, other Old Masters in the duke’s collection can stay on long-term loan at the NGS.
“We now feel within sight of our campaign,” said Penny, who explained that there were other donors ready to give, or not wanting their gift disclosed yet. He said benefactors need not pay immediately: They have up to three years to give cash. (Bloomberg)

Artist Charles Thomson lives alone in a small north London house next to the ring road. He paints in a white kitchen overlooking a little yard, and keeps color cards, paintbrushes and tubes near the kettle and stove.
His wistful oil-and-acrylic portraits, often of women he was close to, are done in a Pop Art style, and hauled down from an upstairs room to be shown to visitors.
Though he wishes it were otherwise, Thomson is better known for his activism than his art: He leads the Stuckists, figurative painters who attack what they see as Tate’s excessive focus on conceptual art, both in collecting and in its leadership of the coveted Turner Prize. Clown-like in their top hats, the Stuckists picketed the late September press presentation of the prize’s 2008 nominees (their placard read “The Turner Prize is crap”) and plan another demonstration for the Dec. 1 prize giving.
“Conceptual art is vacuous and pretentious,” says the skinny, bespectacled Thomson, 55. “We think figurative painting with ideas is a really exciting art form.”
“I can’t see that a dirty bed or a dead shark is any more significant in an art gallery than it would be where you’d normally find those objects,” he says, referring to Tracey Emin’s 1998 “My Bed” (a Turner Prize nominee), and to Turner winner Damien Hirst’s sharks in formaldehyde. (Bloomberg)

Eli Broad, the philanthropist whose gift financed a new contemporary-art building this year at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, is planning to build another exhibition space for his vast collection, even as a third museum devoted to contemporary art here is facing a financial squeeze.
Mr. Broad, who early this year said he was not interested in building his own museum to display his collection, is now mulling the construction of new offices for his art foundation and “a first-class public art museum,” according to a letter sent last month to the City of Beverly Hills by a lawyer representing him.
The move comes as the Museum of Contemporary Art, a separate, privately financed institution in downtown Los Angeles, is facing a budget crisis that has led it to shut down part of its facilities for six months and to step up an effort to find new financing. In a statement Wednesday the museum said its board was “currently evaluating several scenarios that could lead to securing long-term viability for the museum and plans to reach a solution within the next 90 days.” (The New York Times)

“The Rape of Europa,” which airs on PBS on Nov. 24 at 9 p.m. New York time, has a number of heroes and heroines. My favorite is Maria Altmann.
It took a lifetime, but finally in 2006 the Austrian government — with much lack of grace — returned a few nice paintings by Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele that the Nazis had pilfered from her uncle’s Viennese mansion during World War II.
Altogether, Nazi elites stole an estimated million-plus artworks in the strangest melding of extermination and aesthetics the world has ever seen.
“The Rape of Europa” documents how the lurid appetite for art coexisted with an equally powerful urge to torment and destroy.
Klimt’s glittering 1907 portrait of Altmann’s aunt, Adele Bloch-Bauer, spent the postwar years thrilling crowds at the Austrian State Gallery in the Belvedere. The Austrians sure didn’t want to see her go.
Altmann, born in 1916 and even in her ninth decade a glorious vision in lavender cashmere and pearls, speaks eloquently of their perfidy and her triumph.
Supposedly, her aunt willed her pictures to the Austrian state, a very ambiguous reading of the text and one that ignores the fact that when she wrote her will in 1923, she hardly expected her beloved country to turn into a happy outpost for murderers and thieves. (Bloomberg)