Christie’s 4/13/24

John Akomfrah on representing Britain at the Venice Biennale: ‘I’m both terrified and enjoying it’



Vivienne Westwood’s playing cards for Greenpeace: ‘Diamonds are for money, clubs are for war’


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Bram Bogart: ‘He took a tradition begun in northern Europe by Rembrandt, and he exploded it’



‘They are part of our collective memory’: the growing market for early-20th-century illustrators



Seven strands of American Modernism — from abstraction to industrial landscapes and the West



‘I’m obsessed with vases, pots, plinths’ — Alexandre Benjamin Navet browses our Collector sales


More stories

Editor’s picks





When Leonora Carrington read The White Goddess, a study of poetic myth by Robert Graves, she called it ‘the greatest revelation of my life’. Its idea of the magical quality of creative expression feeds into Levitasium, from 1950, a dreamlike vision of dancing and levitating figures, supernatural beings and red-headed birds

Estimate: €250,000-350,000
23 April, Paris






Though it dates from an era when timepieces were often embellished with sculpted flowers, animals or chariot-mounted deities, this Louis XVI skeletonised clock is pared back to the essentials. With the brass workings of cogs, weights and springs laid bare, the design seems strikingly modern for 1790

Estimate: £12,000-18,000
until 23 April, Online






The easy charm of Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s The Performance is enhanced by the fact that it is a sketch rather than a finished painting. A study from around 1773 of two girls playfully teaching a lapdog to stand on its hind legs, it may have been a preparatory work for a lost canvas or one that was never completed

Estimate: $150,000-250,000
17 April, New York






Table bells, once used to call guests or staff to the dining room, came in many forms, some more whimsical than others. This George V silver bell, dating from 1911, is designed in the shape of a pig, with a winding mechanism on the underside. The bell is rung by pressing the tail or the snout

Estimate: $4,000-6,000
until 25 April, Online