According to the New York Times, an auction at the Grand Palais in Paris fetched a record-breaking $261 million. The Yves Saint-Laurent, Pierre Berge art collection on the auction bloc several included hundreds of big-ticket items, including a Matisse (which sold for $40.6 million), a Mondrian painting ($24 million), and a rare sculpture by Constantin Brancusi, which garnered $36 million, unprecedented for sculpture.
Art critics and auctioneers believe that this marks a growing economic trend: art and fashion as investments. In fact, the auction was planned in part as a test of whether the wealthy will shrink from prodigious purchases amid economic crisis.
It paid off: a total of 733 pieces of art owned by the late fashion legend Yves Saint-Laurent were sold.
Berge, the fashion designer's partner in business and personal life, told press that he believed the sale would reaffirm the value of art as an investment refuge.
Still, the auction’s success did little to assuage general uncertainty over the international economic meltdown that has inflicted heavy damage on the art market. Berge noted said that he had stopped buying "for that reason." It's a step, though, he said.
He plans to donate most of the profits to HIV/AIDS research. He has told journalists that this sale honored the compulsive (and in terms of furniture and art-collecting, impulsive) energy of Saint-Laurent, who died last year at age 71.
But there was at least one sign of restraint. Nobody raised their auction paddle for a Picasso painting from his Cubist period, "Musical Instruments on a Table," considered the signature piece in the collection, with an estimated value of $38 million.
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