Christie's to Sell Ted Turner's Western Art, Led by a Bierstadt Yosemite Painting
Christie's, the London-based auction house, is selling works from the collection of Ted Turner, the media executive who founded CNN. Turner died at the age of 87 earlier this year. The works are valued at around $20 million, according to ArtNews.
The sale is headlined by Yosemite Valley, an 1866 painting by Alfred Bierstadt, a German-born artist who painted the American West. The canvas is a view of the valley in California's Yosemite National Park. For a long time it hung above a fireplace at Turner's ranch in Montana.
Turner bought the painting at Sotheby's, a rival auction house, in 2003. Christie's has given it a high estimate of $6 million. An estimate is the auction house's expected price range, and the high estimate is the top of that range. The estimate is for the hammer price, the bid the auctioneer closes on, before fees are added.
The current auction record for a Bierstadt is $7.3 million, set in 2008. An auction record is the highest price ever paid at auction for that artist's work.
Two Thomas Moran paintings of the Grand Canyon from the Turner collection are also going under the hammer. One of them, The Inner Gorge, Grand Canyon, carries a high estimate of $6 million. Moran's auction record is $17.7 million, also set in 2008.
Money from the sale will go to the Turner Foundation, according to the same report. The figures show how the sale's total can differ from its estimates. In January, Christie's sold William Koch's Western art for more than $84 million including buyer's premiums. Buyer's premiums are the extra fee that winning bidders pay on top of the hammer price. Before that sale, the expected total had been $50 million.
Western American painting has drawn strong bidding at Christie's before. The Turner works will show whether that interest carries over to a collection that once hung in a family home. For the Turner Foundation, the proceeds will be a direct result of the sale.
For the people behind the scenes, this kind of sale means weeks of careful work. Specialists must check each painting's condition, photograph it and pack it for travel. Every painting must also be insured while it moves between the ranch, the auction house and the buyers who take it home.
