St. Laurent Auction Extravaganza
The city of light lives also by reflected glory, and rarely has an event been more “mediatized,†as the French like to say, than next week’s auction of the collection of Yves Saint Laurent, who died last June at 71. (The designer’s music room is pictured.) The New York Times reports that auction house Christie’s ‘has spent $1.2 million alone on renting and refurbishing 140,000 square feet of the Grand Palais for the auction. Six separate sales are scheduled over three days, beginning Monday night with Impressionist and modern art. In all there are 690 lots in the auction ranging from the stunning to the more mundane (a 19th-century Indian dagger with a rock-crystal handle estimated at around $500 to $760).Even in these parlous, penurious times, Christie’s expects the auction to bring 200 to 300 million euros ($250 million to $380 million), a far cry from the $600 million or more that the auction house had envisaged before the financial crisis hit art markets last fall.’
