Albright-Knox Art Gallery's coffers increased by millions in a matter of minutes Thursday, thanks to four works of art sold by Sotheby's auction house.
Most of the money came from the sale of Luca della Robbia's circa-1450 Relief of the Madonna and Child. Its sale for slightly more than $2 million exceeded the estimated price of $700,000 to $1 million set by Sotheby's.
In all, the sale of two paintings and two sculptures totaled $3.1 million, with the auction house retaining a commission from the sale. The proceeds will be restricted to the gallery's acquisition endowment, which has been used to acquire 740 modern and contemporary artworks since 2013.
"We are very pleased with the result of the sale," said Joe Lin-Hill, the art gallery's deputy director. "The top lot we offered, the Luca della Robbia, was really such an extraordinary work."
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The work by the Florence sculptor features mother and child in tin-glazed terra cotta on a blue background, with a box frame glazed in white with turquoise strips, and blue discs at each corner that imitate marble inlay.
The Albright-Knox Art Gallery also said it plans to sell a dozen artworks, including antiquities and paintings from the 15th to 17th centuries.
"We don't know who bought any of these works, but that was certainly a real prize," Lin-Hill said. "It did extremely well, and that was the one we were most pleased about."
The four works – plus two that didn't sell – are from the 15th and 17th centuries. They predate the museum's scope and mission of collecting and exhibiting modern art, which began around 1860, and contemporary art made in the present day.
The six artworks were last exhibited at the Albright-Knox between 1998 and 2002, just before Louis Grachos, the museum's previous director, took the reins with a renewed focus on the museum's mission.
Lin-Hill said deaccessioning artworks when they don't fit into a museum's scope is standard practice in museums everywhere.
"We are one of the strongest museums in the world for modern and contemporary art, and everyone in the community should be really proud of that," Lin-Hill said. "But we are not an encyclopedic museum for all the great works of art for all time."
The Albright-Knox's sale of nearly 200 works in 2007 through Sotheby's created a storm of controversy, with many museum-goers opposed to selling valuable artworks, regardless of how they fit into the museum's mission.
The sale included $28 million spent by a European collector for Artemis and the Stag, an early Roman Imperial sculpture. All proceeds also went into the museum's acquisitions endowment.
The Albright-Knox Art Gallery’s sale of the prized bronze statue “Artemis and the Stag” earned $25.5 million Thursday at Sotheby’s auction house in New York City, setting records as the most expensive sculpture and antiquity sold through auctions. Final sales from Thursday’s auction of 25 antiquities from the gallery’s permanent collection totaled $35.8 million, bringing profits from the gallery’s
The Sotheby's auction Thursday made international news with the $92 million sale of a small, circa-1480 painting by Sandro Botticelli entitled "Portrait of a Young Man Holding a Roundel." That is the most ever for a Renaissance portrait of an actual person, Lin-Hill said.
The three other Albright-Knox artworks purchased:
• "Adoration of the Magi," a circa-1518 pair of oil paintings framed together by The Master of 1518 (artist unknown) that sold for $163,800.
• "River landscape with fishermen tending their nets along a bank," a circa-1600s piece by Salomon van Ruysdael, which sold for $478,800, above the estimated price of $200,000 to $300,000.
• Don Juan de Cardenas and Dona Juana de Ludena, Duke and Duchess of Maqueda, a late 16th-century alabaster sculpture by an unknown Spanish artist that sold for $504,000.
Sotheby's does not reveal the names of its buyers.
Mark Sommer covers preservation, development, the waterfront, culture and more. He's also a former arts editor at The News.
