Prague, July 18 (CTK) – The volume of the Czech auction market is growing and some works of art return to it more and more often and some of them sell for much higher prices, Artplus server focused on arts business wrote today.
It cited the example of A Chimney Sweep and a Snowman, a painting by Czech painter Jindrich Styrsky (1899-1942), which fetched a record 23.6 million crowns including a surcharge at an auction staged by European Arts in May. Its price rose by almost 16.9 million crowns after six years, when it was sold previously.
The server writes that minimally 20 out of 163 works of art offered for the starting price of over half a million crowns this year were repeated sales. This is 12 percent of the total.
Jan Skrivanek, from Artplus, said one whole half of re-sold works of art originated around 1900, whose popularity has been growing in the past two years.
Styrsky’s A Chimney Sweep and a Snowman beat the record set by his Maldoror eight years ago. The buyer paid 12.76 million, including the surcharge, for the painting.
Styrsky is only the fourth Czech painter whose work was auctioned off for more than 20 million crowns. The three others are Frantisek Kupka, Toyen and Josef Sima.
The turnover of the Czech plastic arts auction market crossed the one billion crown mark to 1.257 billion in 2016 for the first time.
In the first half of the year, collectors spent 730 million crowns at auctions, compared to 570 million in the same period last year.
($1=22.762 crowns)
