Nikolaos Gyzis tops London sale
Early this week, 173 paintings by Greek artists, most from private collections around the world, were auctioned off in London at the Sotheby’s autumn Greek Sale. The total takings of Monday’s auction came to 4,380,882 euros, a figure not far off the initial estimate of 4 million euros. Of the 173 works, 106 were sold – 62 percent by lot and 73.4 percent by value. About 37 percent of the works sold fetched better prices than their highest original estimates, first and foremost the auction’s highlight, Nikolaos Gyzis’s (1842-1901) recently discovered «The Fortuneteller,» which went for 363,011 euros – the initial estimate being 200,000 euros. The senior director and head of Sotheby’s Greek art department, Constantine Frangos, expressed his optimism about the continuous power of the market. The results have indeed been positive, especially given last May’s Greek sale in the British capital, whose total takings came to 3,122,916 euros. Nevertheless, the 4-million-euro figure is still considerably lower than the revenues of two earlier Greek sales, in November 2008 (7,429,299 euros) and May 2008 (11,866,665 euros). During this week’s sale, four new records were set for works by artists Spyros Vassiliou, Georgios Zongolopoulos, Constantin Xenakis and Konstantinos Byzantios. After Gyzis, Spyros Vassiliou’s «Patission Street» brought the next highest price at 222,383 euros, followed by Nikos Hadjikyriakos-Ghikas’s «The Captive (Olive Trees)» and Gyzis’s «Young Woman Washing by the River» with both those works selling at 202,293 euros.
