SALE: Antiquities at Christie's and Sotheby's
LOCATION: New York
DATE: June 7-8
ABOUT: Next week, New York's auction houses will be taken over by ancient, rare marble statuary as Christie's and Sotheby's prepare for their respective antiquities sales. At Sotheby's Thursday a late Hellenistic marble figure of the Capitoline Aphrodite (c. 2nd century A.D.) is expected to be the top lot, with an estimate of $300,000-500,000. It was once owned by the London-based Thomas Hope (of the same Hope family that lent its name to the Hope Diamond), a prominent collector of antiquities who also owned the Hope Dionysos, which now sits at the center of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Sculpture Court. Also on offer is a Greek marble grave stele, dating from the latter part of the 4th century B.C.E. (est. $300,000-500,000), which was discovered in Athens in 1877, was exhibited at the Met from 1964 to 2011, and is being offered at Sotheby's as part of the renowned collection of Jan Mitchell.
On Friday at Christie's, a Greek bronze mirror from the late Classical or early Hellenistic period (350-300 B.C.E.), featuring the Trojan couple Paris and Helen sitting together on a group of rocks, is expected to fetch $600,000-900,000. The mirror has been traded several times in the last few decades, spending time in a private collection in Germany, then at Phoenix Ancient Art, a dealership in Geneva and New York, and finally being purchased by a private collector in Geneva as late as 2006. One of the oldest works on offer at the sales is a Judean Desert limestone mask from the pre-pottery Neolithic era (c. 7th millennium B.C.E.). The 9-inch long, oval-shaped mask, consigned from a New York collection, is estimated to set one back $400,000-600,000 — not a terrible price for an object with an almost 10,000-year history.
OTHER INTERNATIONAL SALES:
Sale: Greenwich Concours d'Elegance: Collectors' Motorcars and Automobilia
Location: Bonhams Greenwich
Date: June 3, 9:30am
Sale: Native American Art Auctions
Location: Bonhams San Francisco
Date: June 4
Sale: Belle Epoque: 19th & 20th Century Decorative Arts and the Joanne Melniker Stern Royal Memorabilia Collection
Location: Doyle New York
Date: June 6
Sale: Modern Art, Post-War and Contemporary Art
Location: Ketterer Kunst Munich
Date: June 9