Giacometti's sculpture was sold for a record amount

London - The bronze sculpture by Alberto Giacometti L’Homme Qui Marche I (Walking Man I) was sold today at Sotheby's auction house in London for £65 million (1.9 billion CZK), making it the most expensive auctioned work by this Swiss artist. A painting by Gustav Klimt that went missing during World War II was sold for £26.9 million (approximately 800 million CZK).
    Sotheby's claims this is the highest price ever paid at auction for a work of art, narrowly surpassing the amount paid six years ago for Pablo Picasso's Boy with a Pipe.
    The entire auction of Impressionist and modern art raised over £146 million (4.35 billion CZK) and greatly exceeded Sotheby's expectations. The auction house had anticipated that the offered works of art would sell for between £69 million and £102 million.
    The estimated price for the 183-centimeter tall bronze by Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966), which was ultimately purchased by an anonymous bidder over the phone, was £12 million to £18 million. The sculpture, cast in 1961, exists in a total of six editions. It was put up for auction by the German bank Dresdner Bank, which was acquired by Commerzbank AG a year ago.
    Paul Cézanne's still life Pichet et Fruits sur une Table (Jug and Fruits on a Table) sold within the estimated price for £11.8 million (350 million CZK). Prior to the auction, attention was drawn to the painting Kirche in Cassone (Landscape with Cypresses), painted by Gustav Klimt in 1913 near Lake Garda in Italy, which went missing after World War II.
    The painting was purchased by Vienna-based industrialist and patron Viktor Zuckerkandl. After his death in 1927, the painting was inherited by his sister Amalie Redlich, who was deported from Vienna to the Jewish ghetto in Łódź, Poland, during the war. Redlich did not return after the war, and the canvas disappeared.
    It resurfaced only in the 1960s. The current owner, who wished to remain anonymous, acquired the canvas in good faith and legally and agreed with Redlich's nephew, eighty-one-year-old Georges Jorisch, who lives in Canada, to sell it together.
    In total, 31 out of 39 offered works were sold today, including paintings by René Magritte, Egon Schiele, Henri Matisse, and a sculpture by Henry Moore. The results of the auction at Sotheby's confirmed a revival in the art market. A similar auction at another London auction house, Christie's, raised £77 million.
    At Christie's auction, a still life by Georges Braque, Fruits, Jug and Pipe, was also for sale. The painting sold at auction in Prague last January for 11.56 million CZK, but this time in London, with an estimated price of £260,000 to £350,000 (7.7 million to 10.4 million CZK), it did not find a buyer.