Page 13 - Sheldon Solow News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

When Suzy Lewis, the granddaughter of the physicist and inventor Thomas Merton, saw that Botticelli’s Portrait of a Young Man with a Roundel (“just looking so gorgeous”) was up for sale again, it came as “such a shock”. In December 1982, the family estate sent it to auction at Christie’s. It proved an “absolute disaster”, Lewis says, and sold for just £810,000—it was expected to make “infinitely more”. Everything had been prepared for the portrait to go to the Getty, Lewis says: the family had even been advised to delay the sale until the Getty was ready to buy, which ...

2020 will be remembered as the year we all lost so much. The coronavirus pandemic has swept the globe, shutting down our cities and towns, and claiming nearly two million lives to date. Outside of that, the rhythms of life continue and people die of what we could now call "normal" causes—that is old age, disease, accidents, and other things that have nothing to do with Covid-19. In 2020, 16 billionaires passed away and in what is surprising, given the current climate, it seems none of them did so as a result of contracting Covid-19. In fact, the only known billionaire to contract coronaviru...

Sandro Botticelli's Portrait of a Young Man Holding a Roundel (around 1480) is set to break a record for the Old Master painter PHOTO: JULIAN CASSADY PHOTOGRAPHY; COURTESY OF SOTHEBY’S Sotheby’s sale this month of an arresting Botticelli portrait, owned by the late real estate billionaire Sheldon Solow, has been heavily publicised. Yet, while Portrait of a Young Man Holding a Roundel (around 1480) is accompanied by the obligatory paraphernalia of X-ray and infra-red images, its many mysteries continue to confound trade and scholars alike. And the estimate, in exc...

Hot properties like Amy Sherald’s The Bathers (2015) are favourites for new billionaire buyers © Amy Sherald This month, Sotheby’s will be offering what it describes as the “ultimate Renaissance portrait” in its annual sale of high-value Old Masters in New York. It hopes this $80m-plus work will reinvigorate top-end demand in a market that since March has been battered by the fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic. According to Bloomberg News, Sandro Botticelli’s Young Man Holding a Roundel is owned by a tax-minimising foundation set up by the billionaire New York...

Clockwise from top left: Stanley Chera, Sheldon Solow, Peter Hauspurg, Gerald Hines, Jerry Wolkoff, and Bianca Yankov In a year when so many lives were lost, real estate was not spared. The industry mourned both legendary figures and those who died too soon. But it was the death of Stanley Chera, the 77-year-old patriarch of Crown Acquisitions, that epitomized the year. The real estate titan had decamped New York City for Deal, New Jersey, early in the pandemic at the behest of his longtime friend, President Donald Trump. But on April 11, Chera died of complications from Covid-19. When Trump ...