US: If the price that has been reported is accurate, every square foot of the piece of fibreboard that was sold in New York this week cost more than $4 million (€3.15 million). But then it was covered in an intricate web of lines in reds, yellows, blues and greys, splashed on to it by a man called Jackson Pollock.
The $140 million (€110 million) quoted as the price obtained by Sotheby's for Pollock's Number 5, 1948 would make it the highest figure known to have been paid for a painting. It would break the record believed to have been set in June when Gustav Klimt's 1907 portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer was bought by cosmetics magnate Ronald Lauder for a reputed $135 million. The prices all have to be heavily qualified, however, because sales of fine art masters between private owners are tightly controlled and secretive.
A Sotheby's spokesman would only say that "the parts of Sotheby's that are public are the big auction sales. Even if [ the Pollock sale] had happened, it was not at auction and no information is available."
The story of the Pollock sale was broken in Thursday's New York Times, which reported that the painting had been put up for purchase by its current owner, David Geffen. Ranked number 45 in the Forbes list of richest Americans, with a net worth of $4.5 billion, Mr Geffen was one of the three founders along with Steven Spielberg of the Dreamworks film studios. He is a keen collector of American artists' work, but last month he sold two paintings by Jasper Johns and Willem de Kooning for a combined sum of $143.5 million, prompting speculation that he was storing up resources for a bid to buy the Los Angeles Times newspaper.
The buyer of the Pollock, according to the sources quoted anonymously by the New York Times, was a Mexican financier who is also shrouded in secrecy, David Martinez. Little is known about him other than that he has recently embarked on a blitz of fine art purchasing.
The Pollock work, Number 5, 1948, is one of his first drip paintings. He had begun to experiment with the technique the previous year, but in 1948 he began to compose works that dispensed with the brush and relied on pouring paint on to the surface.
Astronomical amounts are likely to change hands for such works because it is rare that masterpieces in private ownership come on to the market. Prices are also being pushed up dramatically by new money flooding into the art market from Russia, the Far East and Latin America. - (Guardian service)