Parke-Bernet

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Formerly Parke-Bernet's headquarters on Madison Avenue in New York, now Carlyle Galleries

Parke-Bernet Galleries Inc. ( Parke-Bernet for short ) was a New York auction house. Founded in 1937, the company had a dominant position in art auctions in the United States in the mid-20th century. In 1964 the British auction house Sotheby’s took over the company, which operated under the name Sotheby Parke Bernet & Co. until 1983 .

history

The Parke-Bernet auction house was named after the two business partners Hiram Haney Parke and GT Otto Bernet. Born in Switzerland in 1882, Bernet began his professional career at the age of 14 with the American Art Association (AAA for short) as a delivery boy. The AAA was the United States' premier art auction house at the beginning of the 20th century. After ten years in the company, Bernet began to appraise works of art and conduct auctions himself. Born in Philadelphia in 1873 , Parke worked for several years at an auction house in his hometown from 1894 before Thomas Kirby, director of the AAA, brought him to the New York auction house. In 1923, Cortland F. Bishop bought the AAA and appointed Parke and Bernet vice presidents. Parke had the appearance of an elegant gentleman and managed the important auctions with masterpieces, while the more down-to-earth Bernet took care of the day-to-day business.

In the 1920s, the New York auction house Anderson Galleries developed into a serious competitor. The company, founded in 1887, had mostly auctioned books for a long time and now began to expand its activities to include the arts. In 1929 AAA merged with Anderson Galleries and was now called American Art Association-Anderson Galleries Inc. or AAA-AG for short. In 1933 Parke became president and Bernet vice-president of the auction house, which had a virtually monopoly on the art market in the United States through the union. Parke and Bernet had small shares in the company, but wanted more say. When Cortland F. Bishop died in 1935, Parke and Bernet decided to go into business for themselves.

In 1937 Parke and Bernet left the AAA-AG and founded the Parke-Bernet auction house. They managed to poach 40 more employees from AAA-AG and within a very short time their success was so great that they were able to take over AAA-AG completely. Now the Parke-Bernet auction house was the leader in art auctions in the United States. GT Otto Bernet died on October 13, 1945. His partner Parke ran the company with the help of his assistants Leslie Hyam, Louis Marion and Mary Vandergrift. This forced the auction house to move to a new building built for this purpose on the corner of Madison Avenue and 76th Street opposite the renowned Carlyle Hotel. Its owner, Robert Dowling, had the new building specially built for Parke-Bernet in order to increase the attractiveness of his hotel. He lured the auction house with an initially cheap rent of 7,000 US dollars a month. In addition, it was agreed that Parke-Bernet would have to pay Dowling two percent of the turnover as additional rent if annual sales exceeded six million dollars.

Rembrandt van Rijn: Aristotle in front of the bust of Homer . In 1961 the painting reached Parke-Bernet's record price of $ 2.3 million

Shortly after the move, Hiram Haney Parke retired and Leslie Hyam became chairman of the auction house. The art trade grew rapidly in the 1950s and Parke-Bernet's regular customers included Henry Ford II and Paul Mellon , members of the Vanderbilt and Rockefeller families , Hollywood stars and Greek shipowners such as Stavros Niarchos . One of Parke-Bernet's major auctions in 1957 was the estate of the banker Georges Lurcy. In addition to French furniture from the 18th century, this collection mainly contained works of Impressionism and Late Impressionism . Artists represented in this auction included Vincent van Gogh , Paul Gauguin , Raoul Dufy , Claude Monet , Alfred Sisley and Pierre-Auguste Renoir . Auction records were achieved by works by Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard, and the top lot was the painting La Serre by Renoir, which went to Henry Ford II for $ 200,000, followed by the painting Mao Taporo by Paul Gauguin, which Greek shipowner Alex Goulandris acquired for $ 180,000. In total, the Lurcy Collection auctioned $ 2,221,355. Even after Hiram Haney Parke's death on April 1, 1959, other notable auctions were held. In 1961, for example, the sale of Alfred W. Erickson's collection caused a sensation. The top lot in the collection was the painting Aristotle in Front of the Bust of Homer by Rembrandt van Rijn , which was auctioned for 2.3 million dollars at the Metropolitan Museum of Art . The Rembrandt painting thus achieved the highest price ever paid for a work of art at an auction.

The record results of the Lurcy auction or the Rembrandt painting were indeed successes for Parke-Bernet, but they also exemplify the problems of the auction house. The increasing sales had already exceeded the limit of 6 million dollars in the early 1950s, so that the rental clause with the revenue sharing by the landlord Dowling took effect. Renting the building on Madison Avenue in the early 1960s cost the auction house almost 20 percent of its gross profit. Another problem arose Parke-Bernet from the European competition, especially from the London houses Sotheby’s and Christie’s . Unlike in the United States, the art market in Europe had almost collapsed as a result of the Second World War . After that, the market developed very slowly, and it was only after the British government lifted currency restrictions in 1954 that the London auctioneers were internationally competitive. In particular, Peter Cecil Wilson , Chairman of Sotheby's, had intended to position his company in the American market for several years. The auction house, which was previously only active in London, increasingly tried to bring American collections to England. The auction of the Goldschmidt collection in 1958 is particularly noteworthy. At this auction, which comprised only seven works of Impressionism and Late Impressionism, not only did the pictures come in from the United States, but all but one of the buyers came from America. With this auction, Sotheby's not only held a quasi-American domestic auction in London, but above all far exceeded the record results of the Lurcy auction. The English auction houses became attractive to American customers for several reasons. Parke-Bernet demanded a relatively high sales commission of up to 25 percent for its auctions, which was enforceable on the market as long as they had almost a monopoly position. In addition, the English auctioneers offered the consignors a minimum sale price, which Parke-Bernet did not want to accept, as this business model seemed too risky to them. The result was an increasing relocation of American art auctions from New York to London.

Peter Wilson from Sotheby's first made a takeover offer to Parke-Bernet in 1947 and renewed this repeatedly in the following years. The negotiations were only successful in 1963 after the suicide of Parke Bernet director Leslie Hyam. In 1964 Parke-Bernet was taken over by Sotheby's and the company was renamed Sotheby-Parke-Bernet. After the American investor A. Alfred Taubman took over the auction house in 1983, the company changed its name to Sotheby's and the Parke-Bernet suffix disappeared.

literature

  • Richard H. Rush: Art as an investment . Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs 1961.
  • Thomas E. Norton: 100 years of collecting in America, the story of Sotheby Parke Bernet . Abrams, New York 1984, ISBN 0-8109-1615-0 .
  • Peter Watson: From Manet to Manhattan, the rise of the modern art market . Random House, New York 1992, ISBN 0-679-40472-4 .
  • Robert Lacey: Sotheby's, The Art of Auctions . Heyne, Munich 1998, ISBN 3-453-12928-8 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b c Robert Lacey: Sotheby's, The art of auctions . P. 146.
  2. ^ Peter Watson: From Manet to Manhattan . P. 282.
  3. ^ Peter Watson: From Manet to Manhattan . P. 284.
  4. ^ Robert Lacey: Sotheby's, The Art of Auctions . P. 147.
  5. ^ Peter Watson: From Manet to Manhattan . P. 313.
  6. ↑ a b Robert Lacey: Sotheby's, The Art of Auctions . P. 156.
  7. ^ Peter Watson: From Manet to Manhattan . P. 317.
  8. ^ Robert Lacey: Sotheby's, The Art of Auctions . P. 149.
  9. ^ Robert Lacey: Sotheby's, The Art of Auctions . P. 157.
  10. ^ Robert Lacey: Sotheby's, The Art of Auctions . P. 138.