Record Price for Abstracts

That moment in 1910 when Vasily Kandinsky laid down his brush upon finishing a certain watercolor represents what is often regarded as the birth of abstract painting. Last week Manhattan's Guggenheim Museum put the pioneer abstractionist's modern-day reputation to a bold test: at the London art auction house of Sotheby & Co., the museum offered for sale no less than 50 of its 170 Kandinskys. Fears that such a mass sale might depress the market proved unwarranted. For it was painting from Kandinsky's early abstractionist period that brought the top money--$140,000 for one Improvisation, a record auction price for abstractions by anybody. Total take: $1,502,200.

On a believe-it-or-not basis, museum officials, including President Harry Guggenheim, insisted that since the museum lacks the display space to show the paintings, they wanted to disperse the work. "We are done now," said the contented Guggenheim. "Before, it was a bit like misers going down into the cellar and counting the gold. Now the rest of the world has all the Kandinskys we are ever going to part with."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.