Dorotheum

The highest price of the year to date at auction in Austria was set by a market-fresh work on paper by Egon Schiele (1890-1918) offered at the latest Modern art sale held at Dorotheum in Vienna.

“A disgusting object” that may be of “some whimsical interest to an obsessive collector” is how Auberon Waugh described a telescopic ear trumpet as used by his father in his later years. Disgusting he may have regarded it, but far more palatable to auctioneers and dealers are the prices of such objects that collectors are prepared to pay.

A rediscovered portrait of the Old Pretender – James Francis Edward Stuart, Prince of Wales – will be sold at Dorotheum in Vienna on October 18.

FRANCE: THE centenary of the Wiener Werkstätte, founded by Josef Hoffmann and Koloman Moser in 1903, was commemorated in Vienna with various museum and gallery exhibitions, and two specialist auctions at the city’s main auction houses – the Dorotheum and Wiener Kunst.

ON May 6 Vienna’s top auction house, Dorotheum, holds an important Design sale featuring works from the turn of the last century by such luminaries as Adolf Loos, Josef Hofmann and Carlo Bugatti through to some 20 square metres of aluminium flooring from the Berlin Skoda Boutique, designed by Mark Newson in 1992.

Austria: This broken pane of glass formed a haunting reminder of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, which precipitated World War I.

AUSTRIA: THE ENTRY of Jörg Haider's far-right Freedom Party into the Austrian government could have repercussions for the country's art market, warns Otto Hans Ressler, director of Austria's second-largest auction firm Wiener Kunst.