Works by an English artist bought at an antique store
60 years later it turns out to be Giacometti
Coming up at Christie’s this month
“The winning bid will be over 10 billion won”
Everyone must have imagined at least once that an item purchased at an antique store at a low price turns out to be the work of a master and is sold for a huge amount. Something like this dream recently happened in England.
According to Art News, an art media outlet on the 31st, the chandelier that British painter John Craxton bought at an antique store in London in the 1960s for 250 pounds (about 380,000 won) turned out to be the work of Alberto Giacometti, a world-renowned sculptor from Switzerland. The chandelier will be up for auction at Christie’s this month. Considering that a similar piece by Giacometti sold for $9.3 million (about 11.4 billion won) at an auction in 2018, the art world is predicting that the winning bid will reach millions of dollars again.
Giacometti, whose ‘signature’ is a thin bronze figure, is the most expensive sculptor in the art market. His representative work, ‘The Man Pointing His Finger’ (1947), was sold for $141.3 million (approximately 170 billion won) at a Christie’s auction in New York in 2015.
Chandeliers and other ornaments were a way for Giacometti to make money. Giacometti began making ornaments and furniture with his brother Diego in 1929. According to the Guardian, a British daily newspaper, it is estimated that the chandelier that Craxton purchased was commissioned by Giacometti’s friend, collector Peter Watson, around 1946. Until 1949, Watson hung a chandelier in the offices of Horizon, the magazine she founded. Afterwards, the chandelier wandered from place to place until it caught the eye of Craxton at an antique shop in London.
The chandelier once went through a ‘genuine controversy’, but the controversy ended in 2021 when the Giacometti Foundation in Paris, France, certified that it was genuine. In an interview with The Guardian, art appraiser James Glenie said, “There are only five or six chandeliers left by Giacometti.”
Reporter Seonah Lee suna@hankyung.com