Dozens of works by artists including Paul Cézanne and Vincent van Gogh have raised a total of $ 1.5 billion at auction from the late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s collection of paintings and sculptures. And among the works, a photograph, The iron by Edward Steichen, sold for $ 11.8 million.
In other words, the snapshot becomes the second most expensive photograph ever sold. Everything that happened a few hours ago at Christie’s auction house in New York was excessive, even if the proceeds will be donated to philanthropic causes according to the wishes of Allen, who passed away in 2018.
Among the most expensive works sold there was He posed them together (version Small) by the pioneer Georges Seurat, an oil on canvas from 1888 depicting three naked women. This work fetched $ 149.2 million, a record for a Seurat piece. The mountain of Sainte-Victoire Cézanne’s, a landscape painted between 1888 and 1890, sold for 137.8 million dollars, another record. And a painting by Gustav Klimt from 1903, Birch forestset the highest score for a work by Klimt, selling for $ 104.6 million.
And as we said at the beginning, a 1905 print of a photograph by Edward Steichen, The ironsold for $ 11.8 million, a record for a Steichen opera and nearly four times Christie’s highest estimate.
However, it remains the record for the most expensive photography of all time Ingres’ violin by Man Ray, which sold for $ 12.4 million last May.
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For its part, Iron is one of Steichen’s most iconic works, often praised by photography enthusiasts as one of the earliest examples of the medium’s ability to match painting as an art form.
The snapshot was taken just two years after the completion of the Flatiron Building in New York, a sign that modernity was flourishing in the city. Additionally, it was also a reference to an earlier photograph of Steichen’s mentor and friend, Alfred Stieglitz, who had photographed the building the year before.
By the way, as far as is known, there are only three copies of the image, two of which are in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum. And all three are different, thanks to Steichen’s use of bichromate gum on the platinum print, which gave each print a different hue.[[[[Petapixel]
