Picasso's Painting & Giacometti's Sculpture Lose Charm!

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oi-Staff

By Staff

Friday, May 22, 2009, 15:22

It seems in the era even classic works also suffer their bad luck. An auction in New York witnessed a sheer lack of buyers for a painting by Picasso and a Giacometti sculpture. Surprisingly, they had been expected to fetch up to 16million pounds each.

The two art pieces that failed the expectations are Picasso's 'The Daughter Of The Artist At Two-and-a-half Years With A Boat' and Giacometti's 'The Cat.' The global financial crisis has adversely affected sales at the auctions of expensive artworks in recent months, and that fewer items are being put up for sale as compared to this time last year.

The Sotheby's auction house, where the artworks were displayed for auction, insists that bidding stopped short of the artworks' reserve prices. 29 of the 36 artworks on offer sold for a total of 40million pounds, well below their 79million pounds estimate. The most robust bidding at the sale was for an abstract painting by Piet Mondrian called Composition in Black and White, With Double Lines. It sold for more than 6million pounds, about twice its pre-sale estimate.