The largest art fair in Europe witnessed sales that reached record prices, including a rare painting by the Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh and works by Picasso and Kees van Dongen, according to what the organizers of this event, which concluded on Friday, announced.
Officials at the European Fine Arts Exhibition explained that the value of the sales, which included some very desirable works, reached “tens of millions of euros,” but they did not specify an accurate total figure for the total proceeds.
The exhibition’s official, Noibi Testa, explained, “It is impossible to count the total sales because many of them were not announced.”
“But we achieved record sales amounting to tens of millions of euros,” she said in a statement to Agence France-Presse.
Among the most prominent works that were on sale this year was a rare painting by Van Gogh that he painted when he was living in the south of the Netherlands around 1884, and a work worth millions of euros by the pioneer of abstract art, Wassily Kandinsky.
The US-based gallery confirmed that Van Gogh’s painting “Head of a Peasant Woman in a White Cover” had been sold, and Dutch media reported that its price had reached the asking price of 4.5 million euros ($4.9 million).
As for the painting “Murnau mit Kirsch 2,” which Kandinsky painted in 1910, it was offered for sale by art dealer Robert Landau, who bought it last year for $45 million at an auction at Sotheby’s.
It was not known whether the painting was sold at the European Fine Arts Exhibition, but Landau told AFP during the exhibition that the value of the painting was recently estimated at “100 million euros.”
Other works by major artists also achieved high prices.
A painting by Pablo Picasso entitled “Woman in an Apron” was sold for nearly two million euros, while a painting by Dutch-French artist Kees van Dongen entitled “Woman with a Hat” was sold for “a sum in the millions to a private European collector.”
Organizers reported that a Safavid mirror from the seventeenth century was sold to the Aga Khan Foundation in Toronto for about 200,000 euros.
A piece of Delphi (glazed) porcelain, previously owned by British fashion photographer Cecil Beaton, fetched about 300,000 euros.
The organizers indicated that about 50,000 visitors came to see the artworks presented by 270 exhibitors from 22 countries during the exhibition, which lasted eight days.
