A Cezanne still life with an unusual past sold for $29.3 million Tuesday night at Sotheby's in London. "Pewter Pitcher and Fruit" (1888-90) was stolen 21 years ago from Dr. Harry Bakwin, a child psychologist in New York who was a major Cezanne collector.
The painting was recovered recently after Lloyd's, the London insurance exchange, approached the Art Loss Register, an international database for stolen and missing art and antiques."Lloyd's got a vague inquiry from someone who wanted information about the cost of insurance for shipping the painting from one country to another," said Julian Radcliffe, chairman of the Art Loss Register in London. He said he did not know who made the initial inquiry or who stole the painting.
"I don't think the police or the FBI know," he said. "Even if they had found out, they couldn't make an arrest," because the seven-year statute of limitations for such thefts had expired.
Nobody is saying exactly how the painting was recovered, but once it ended up with members of the Bakwin family, they decided to sell it. Sotheby's did not identify the buyer, who bid by telephone through Tobias Meyer, the auction house's director of contemporary art worldwide. The estimate was $14.8 million to $19.8 million.
Not only was the painting one of the artist's finest still lifes, but Bakwin's collection was also well known, and that provenance probably helped drive up the price. Another Cezanne from the collection, "Young Italian Woman Leaning on Her Elbow" (1895-1900), was sold to the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles last week for a reported $50 million.
Also sold on Tuesday at Sotheby's in London was a group of 25 Picassos -- five oil paintings and 20 works on paper -- that had belonged to Gianni Versace, the Italian fashion designer, who was fatally shot in Miami Beach in 1997. Like the clothes he designed, the paintings are all decorative and brightly colored.
The top seller was "Young Girl With Boat (Maya)," a 1938 rendering of Picasso's elder daughter, Maya, dressed in a sailor suit. An unidentified European collector bought it for $6 million, far above its estimate of $3.3 million to $5 million. A three-quarter-length 1938 portrait of Dora Maar, one of Picasso's mistresses, sold for $5.3 million.