Modigliani nude fetches record $170 million at auction

“By acquiring important representative artworks in each historical period, they have gradually established three main subjects of collection, namely Chinese traditional art, Chinese revolutionary art and modern and contemporary art”.

Amedeo Modigliani, Nu couché, 1917-18. It had formerly belonged to art historian Laura Mattioli Rossi, daughter of acclaimed Italian collector Gianni Mattioli, and had belonged to the Mattioli family for six decades.

As a teenager growing up in Shanghai during the tumultuous years of the Cultural Revolution, he sold handbags on the street and later worked as a taxi driver.

A few resistance was already visible during the packed evening sale, which was part of a 10-day marathon in which more than $2.1 billion of art is on offer at Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Phillips. It was pursued by Stephane C. Connery, a private art dealer, and Paul Gray, director of Richard Gray Gallery in Chicago and NY whose clients include hedge-fund manager Kenneth Griffin. “First you must be fond of the art. Then you can have an understanding of it”.

Liu Yiqian and his wife Wang Wei receiving the certificate from Christie’s for their purchase of a record-priced Tibetan tapestry.

“He made his first big pot of money by buying low and selling high on a stock trade”, says Isaac Stone Fish, who writes about all things Asian at Foreign Policy magazine.

It raked in a total of $491.35 million, busting pre-sale estimates of $443 million marking a return to form after a sluggish opening auction at Sotheby’s suggested that bumper profits might be levelling off. It sold for $36 million.

Nov 10, 2015- A painting by Amedeo Modigliani has fetched US$170.4m (£112.7m) at an auction in NY, setting a world record for the artist. The price difference between a good piece by an artist and a great one would expand “exponentially” over the years, he said. “The emperor and concubine should have used it. I was simply trying to breathe in their immortality”. And it only cost him 170 million dollars.

So how does someone in China go from cabbie to global art collector in the span of a few years?

Chinese art collector Liu Yiqian confirmed to the NY Times that he was the buyer of the painting. “If they continue to attract very major property we may see more sales with this approach”. A Pablo Picasso work, Les Femmes d’Alger (Version O), sold by Christie’s in May of 2015 is the only painting that generated higher bids before the gavel fell than Nu Couché.