Edvard Munch's 'The Scream' goes for $119.9 million at Sotheby's

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LV outlet uk NEW YORK -- Sometimes beauty is trumped by the beast. After bullish expectations and an aggressive marketing campaign for an image considered the quintessential expression of modern horror, Sotheby'sNew York sold Edvard Munch's 1895 “The Scream” for $119.9 million on Wednesday night, setting a record for the most expensive artwork sold at auction.The top spot was previously held by Picasso's 1932 “Nude, Green, Leave and Bust” -- a painting of his much-younger lover Marie-Therese Walter that sold at Christie’s in 2010 for $106.5 million.The identity of the buyer, who was bidding by phone during the 12-minute auction, has not been confirmed. Bidding started at $40 million, with at least five bidders. Rumors before the sale, not confirmed, focused on interest from the royal family of Qatar.Munch's "The Scream" achieved another milestone: It now ranks as the most expensive drawing publicly sold. For this version of “The Scream” -- one of four -- is best described as a crayon or pastel drawing, not a painting, on board. The Munch Museum in Oslo owns a pastel as well as a painted version, while the National Gallery of Norway holds the earliest painting, dated 1893.And it easily beat out the previous auction record for Munch, also held by Sotheby's. In 2008, the auction house sold the 1894 Munch painting "Vampire," a melodramatic image of a red-haired, bare-armed woman kissing a man's neck, for about $38 million.Judd Tully, the art-market expert who is editor at large of Art+Auction magazine, said it was hard to identify the potential pool of buyers. “Under a dozen collectors have been identified who would buy something north of $50 million, and the number gets lower as the prices go up,” he said before the sale.

LV uk sale But in the case of such a “powerful and famous image,” he added, “there could be someone outside of that club who has fallen prey to the marketing campaign or just decided they wanted the image.”The central image in this artwork is the gaping-mouthed, skull-like face and twisting torso that people know so well from reproductions, cartoons and a seemingly endless stream of merchandise, from shower curtains to neckties. The location depicted is Ekeberg Hill, an overlook point in the south of Oslo that was known as the scene of suicides.Some read the image as a symbol of modern existentialist anguish, expressing fear of a hostile universe and perhaps even anticipating the horrors of the world wars. Others view it more specifically as an expression of personal suffering.Munch's mother died of tuberculosis when he was 5; his sister Sophie died when he was 14; his father died when he was 25 and shortly after that his sister Laura was institutionalized.According to Munch's biographer Sue Prideaux, Laura was committed to an asylum in Ekeberg for schizophrenia, and from the vantage point depicted in the artwork, you could hear the screams from the asylum patients as well as the animals from a slaughterhouse nearby.The first owner of the work sold at Sotheby's was German chicory and coffee mogul Arthur von Franquet, a patron who also owned Munch's 1892 painting “Girl by the Window,” now at the Art Institute of Chicago. Its second owner was the Berlin banker and art collector Hugo Simon, who sold it through an art dealer around 1937 to Norwegian ship owner Thomas Olsen.

LV replica uk A neighbor of Munch's in the tiny town of Hvisten who became one of his greatest collectors, Olsen at one point helped the artist hide his works from the Nazis. Thomas's son Petter, who put the work up for sale at Sotheby's, has issued a statement saying he will be using the proceeds to finance the creation of a new Munch museum in Hvitsten.For the months leading up to the sale, Sotheby's mounted an unprecedented campaign to help ensure that the celebrated image brought an illustrious price. On top of the usual glossy catalog spreads and the increasingly familiar video spots, Sotheby's also created a limited-edition catalog dedicated solely to "The Scream" with essays by Prideaux and New Yorker magazine writer Adam Gopnik. Along with showing off the drawing at London and New York previews, the auction house also flew it to the homes of interested collectors. And the previews themselves were dramatic affairs, with "The Scream" spotlighted in an otherwise dark room. “Our ambition was to do something really special to reflect the historic moment,” said Simon Shaw, head of Sotheby's Impressionist/modern department in New York. “I've never had the privilege of handling such a significant and memorable work of art, and I doubt I will have the privilege of doing that again.”Tully said he hasn't seen anything like this since the London gallery White Cube's promotion of the Damien Hirst diamond-encrusted-skull, “For the Love of God,” when hundreds lined up to see the work. “I think maybe Sotheby's took something from that sale for its marketing machine.”

cheap lv bags sale Tully added that it was particularly hard to estimate the value of this work in advance because it doesn't fit familiar blue-chip criteria. “It's an Expressionist work and it's colorful, and those are two things that are very desirable in the current trophy market. But it's the oddest trophy -- not that big, and it's a pastel.”“A purist of sorts would say that it can't be that valuable: You can't call it an oil on canvas, because it's not either,” he added.Shaw, on the other hand, stressed that crayon was a perfect choice for the work. “The artist designed "The Scream" to be a new sort of history painting for the godless age: It's a radically new subject matter for which Munch sought a radically new technique, one with every stroke visible, with no deception, no artifice and total authenticity.”Shaw would not disclose the financial terms negotiated with the seller, but to land such high-profile consignments the big auction houses will often make a sweetheart deal. Sometimes they will forego a seller's commission; at times, they also turn over part of the buyer's premium to the seller.Whatever the exact arrangement, “The Scream” also paid off in a smaller way for the auction house by drawing more notable artworks to the sale. This sale had a particular strength in Surrealist painting, with several works by René Magritte, a hallucinatory landscape by Salvador Dali, a lurid jungle scene by Max Ernst and a darkly Freudian narrative by Paul Delvaux featuring nude women, a stairway and a tunnel.The Wednesday auction also contained five other works -- all oil paintings -- by Munch. Shaw confirmed that the two European collections supplying these works for sale agreed to do so only after learning that "The Scream" would be part of the auction. “For some people, the chance of selling alongside one of the great masterpieces in art history is pretty compelling,” Shaw said.

cheap lv shoes sale WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Wednesday was a rough day for the prosecutors who are trying to persuade a jury that Roger Clemens lied to the U.S. Congress when he denied that he had ever used performance-enhancing drugs.It was bad enough when U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton told the prosecutors that they were taking positions that were "totally absurd."But it was even worse when he indicated that he was seriously considering an argument from the Clemens legal team that could force the jury to eliminate any consideration of Andy Pettitte's testimony that Clemens admitted to him that he had used HGH. ESPN's T.J. Quinn will provide live coverage from the courtroom during the Clemens trial. Follow along with our up-to-the-minute Twitter coverage.And that was not all. The judge finally noticed that the pace of the trial had dropped from slow to glacial. His observation came after the 16 jurors told him they were irritated that they were spending long spells in the jury room while Walton conducted lengthy and rambling colloquies with prosecutors and the Clemens defense team.The threat to the prosecution's critical testimony from Pettitte came after Pettitte completed his testimony on Wednesday morning.In his cross-examination of Pettitte, Clemens attorney Michael Attanasio had been emphasizing that Pettitte's account of Clemens admitting HGH use was based on a "casual, passing reference" that came during a vigorous workout in 1999 or 2000. He used the phrase at least four times, highlighting the "huffing and puffing" that were part of the workout and the conversation. It was an effort to inject some uncertainty into Pettitte's account.Then, in what may become a turning point in the trial, Attanasio asked this question and received this answer from Pettitte in the final question in a series of them inquiring whether Pettitte may have misunderstood Clemens when he admitted the HGH use:"Would it be 50-50 that you may have misunderstood him?""That would be fair."Steven Durham, recognizing that the "50-50" comment could be a problem, tried to rehabilitate Pettitte's testimony in a series of questions after Attanasio concluded his impressive cross-examination.

cheap lv wallets sale It did not go well for Durham.At one point, Pettitte included in an answer to a Durham question a mention of "the conversation that I thought I had in 1999 or 2000." The best that Durham could achieve was to elicit from Pettitte that he "made a mental note of the conversation at the time it happened" and that he did not remember any other specific conversations from 1999 to 2000.Within seconds after Pettitte was excused from the witness chair and the jury left the courtroom, Attanasio pounced, demanding that Walton strike Pettitte's account of Clemens' admission of HGH use. "If his certainty is only 50-50, it does not qualify as evidence that should be presented to the jury" for its consideration, Attanasio said.His argument was a surprise, and the judge's reaction was an even bigger surprise. In accusatory tones, Walton told Durham, "You did not ask the right question. You did not ask him what his recollection was today."It was as close to a "gotcha" as you will ever hear from a judge presiding over a trial. Why didn't Durham ask Pettitte for his current recollection of what Clemens said? Did he not know how Pettitte would respond? It's a possibility. In another series of questions, Durham raised the issue of Clemens' chances to be elected to the Hall of Fame. He asked Pettitte whether it was important to Clemens, but Pettitte responded that "I can't say I ever heard him talk about that."The "50-50" comment and Attanasio's clever argument led Walton to a discussion of "quantitative analysis" of evidence. The different standards of proof in any trial range from proof beyond a reasonable doubt of guilt in a criminal case through the idea of "clear and convincing" evidence and finally down to a "preponderance" of the evidence.In most rulings on the propriety of evidence, the "preponderance" standard is used. It means that the evidence is more probably true than not true, a standard that is frequently expressed as 51 percent by lawyers and judges.Walton put the 51 percent expression of the standard together with Pettitte's testimony that it was 50-50 that he may have misunderstood Clemens. It puts the prosecutors in a bad spot. Durham and his team will argue that the quality of the evidence is the important criterion and that quantitative analysis has no role in deciding what evidence a jury should consider.

cheap lv belts sale They may also argue that the "50-50" phrase is an idiomatic expression of colloquial American English and has no connection to the 51 percent standard of the rules of evidence.It will be a difficult argument, but it is an argument the prosecution must win to preserve its chances of obtaining a conviction of Clemens.It was a few minutes after the "50-50" arguments that Walton accused the prosecutors of taking positions that seem "totally absurd."His observation came in a complex argument about the effects of attorney-client privilege on the government's attempt to prove that Clemens lied when he told the U.S. House of Representatives that he had "no idea" that former Sen. George Mitchell wanted to interview him as part of Mitchell's investigation into steroid use in Major League Baseball.Mitchell made the request to the Major League Baseball Players Association, which relayed it to Clemens' agents. Prosecutor Daniel Butler wanted to show that Clemens and his agents refused to talk to the committee, but after an extensive argument Walton decided that the attorney-client privilege barred any use of communications among Clemens and the union. It was a close call, and Walton may be right. But he may not. It is difficult to see how the prosecutors' attempt to present important evidence and some tricky circumstances qualified as "absurd."The final surprise from Walton was his attempt to move the trial at a faster pace. He had been taking a leisurely approach, taking three days off to give a speech in Reno and two hours on Wednesday for a medical appointment. To move things along, he asked the prosecution how many witnesses they would present (20) and how long it would take (two weeks.) And then he announced that the trial would resume at 11 on Thursday morning, two hours later than the usual starting time.Despite the setbacks, the prosecution ended the day on a positive note with testimony from Jeff Novitzky, the FDA agent who has led doping investigations since 2002. Novitzky is not only a creative and forceful investigator, he is a formidable witness who can capture and maintain the attention of the jury.