“World’s Oldest Hebrew Bible and Rare Artworks Up for Auction at Sotheby’s and Christie’s”

2023-05-10 08:19:17

Highlight of the sales from May 11 to 19 in one of the world capitals of the arts, Sotheby’s will sell the oldest and most complete Hebrew Bible, dating from the tenth century.

New York is hosting the traditional spring auction season for the art market from Thursday: the world’s two largest auction houses, Sotheby’s and Christie’s, will offer an additional Hebrew Bible for tens of millions of dollars. a thousand years old and exceptional paintings by Klimt and Douanier Rousseau.

Already presented in New York in February and in March in Tel Aviv, the Sassoon Codex, named following its best-known owner, David Solomon Sassoon (died 1942), dates from the year 900 of our era and represents the one of the most expensive manuscripts on the antiquarian book market.

This work, in an exceptional state of preservation and from which only a few pages are missing, binds 24 books of the Hebrew Bible. It might reach an astronomical price of between 30 and 50 million dollars on May 17.

“Excessively rare”

On a market for auctions of works of art whose health is still insolent – despite the succession of international crises -, Sotheby’s will also offer on May 16 the painting Island on the Attersee (1901-1902) by Austrian painter Gustav Klimt.

This is the first time that this masterpiece, “exceedingly rare”, according to the house owned by Franco-Israeli media and telecom magnate Patrick Drahi, is up for auction following decades of being curated by private owners. It might be sold for $45 million.

At rival Christie’s, controlled by French billionaire François Pinault’s Artémis holding company, sales begin on May 11 with an expected record for Flamingos (1910) by French post-impressionist painter Henri (Douanier) Rousseau.

A painting by Henri Rousseau entitled “Les Flamants” estimated between $20 and $30 million, displayed at Christie’s auction house in New York on May 2, 2023 ahead of the sale on May 11, 2023 (ED JONES / AFP)

“You can go your whole life without ever seeing a painting like this (…) probably one of the rarest you will see at Christie’s”welcomed Max Carter, vice-president of the auction company for the arts of the 20th and 21st centuries.

The Web Flamingos might leave for 30 million dollars on Thursday, whereas 30 years ago the record for a Douanier Rousseau had been 4.4 million dollars.

2022, record year

Sotheby’s will also offer an exceptional Now’s the Time of the American painter Jean-Michel Basquiat who died in 1988 at the age of 27, which might reach more than 30 million dollars.

Finally, the French sculptor and visual artist Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) will be honored with her Spider three meters in height and which might be purchased for 30 to 40 million dollars, a record.

However, these spring sales are unlikely to exceed the highs reached during the fall and spring sales in 2022, one of the most prosperous years in the history of the art market.

At Christie’s, the art collection of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, who died in 2018, had passed the historic one billion dollar mark in November (almost 1.5 billion in total) with a rain of records for works by Van Gogh, Cézanne or Gauguin.

Last May, a portrait of Marilyn Monroe, Shot Sage Blue Marilyn by Andy Warhol, went for $195 million.

At Sotheby’s, also a year ago, the Macklowe collection, named following a wealthy New York couple, reached $922 million.

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