German born Martin Carlin (1730-1785) went to France to work as an ebenist and was neither very successful nor rich but he made a considerable amount of nice piece of furnitures which was mainly bought by the Rue du Fbg St Martin (Paris) furniture dealers of the time. Tzarina Maria Feodorovna of Württemberg, wife of Emperor Paul I of Russia, bought a Martin Carlin writing desk which she used in her palace of Pavlovsk, near St Petersburg. After the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 it was bought by the English art dealer Lord Duveen and eventually arrived in the collection of Anna Dodge, wife of the founder of the American car company. In 1971, the Dodge collection was put for sale on auction and this writing desk was sold to the Iranian art collector and oil magnate Habib Sabet for $ 415,800, thus becoming the owner of the most expensive piece of furniture in history. At that time TIME magazine ironized about the St Vitus's dance of the International Art Market and asked "who needs masterpieces at that prices"? After the Iranian revolution of 1979 it was smuggled out of Iran and, twelve years later, once more sold on auction for £ 918,000 ($1.3 million) to the P.Getty Museum of Ma;ibu. This time TIME Magazine prudently abstained from any sort of ironical comments. No wonder Iranian people do not like American people today....
The greatest of the Flemish sixteenth-century masters of genre was Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1525-1569). From 1559 he dropped the 'h' from his name and started signing his paintings as Bruegel.
We know little of his life except that he had been to Italy, like so many northern artists of his time, and that he lived and worked in Antwerp and Brussels, where he painted most of his pictures in the 1560s, the decade in which the stern Duke of Alva, committed persecutor of Protestants and a Protestants mass murderer, arrived in the Netherlands. He was the son of a peasant residing in the village of Brueghel. Bruegel specialized in landscapes populated by peasants. He is often credited as being the first Western painter to paint landscapes for their own sake, rather than as a backdrop for history painting. And people used to refer to him as Peasant Bruegel. He died in Brussels in September 1569. He was the father of Pieter Bruegel the Younger and Jan Bruegel the Elder.Attention to the life and manners of peasants was rare in the arts in Brueghel's time. His contemporaries preferred to paint nobilities and flatter the vanity of rich people in order to secure some commissions. Bruegel's earthy, unsentimental but vivid depiction of the rituals of village-life—including agriculture, hunts, meals, festivals, dance and games are unique windows on a vanished folk culture and a prime source of iconographic evidence about both physical and social aspects of 16th century life. This picture went for 78,000 Guineas or $ 229,320 at an auction in 1965. The picture is now on display at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (Austria).
In May 2007, Sotheby's New York city achieved the evening sale of a lifetime with a global sale amount of $255 million for 65 works of art.The star of the evening was the White Center picture by Mark Rothko that fetched $72.8 million with a guaranteed price of $46 million by Sotheby's autioneer Tobias Meyer and an opening bid of 28 million. Forty-one of the works offered that night sold for over $1 million. On the White Center only Sotheby's made a staggering profit of $16 million. Commenting the fabulous price reached by the Rothko, Nicholas Mclean, an New York art dealer, only said :"Someone had just bought a Rockfeller."But Rothko was not the only artist to fetch crazy levels on this historical night : Jim Hodges' No-One Ever Leaves, a leather jacket tossed in a corner (picture above) whose hem is joined to the wall by a spider web of thin silver chains (making the whole thing a work of contemporary art) sold for $690,000.Jim Hodges, not to be confused with James Hovis "Jim" Hodges (1956-) who served one term as the Governor of South Carolina (1999-2003), was born in Spokane, Washington in 1957. He received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree, in 1980, from Fort Wright College, in Spokane, and a Master of Fine Arts degree, in 1986, from Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, New York. He is a a conceptual artist and a sculptor of creative interactive environments.
Painted by French Impressionist Claude Oscar Monet (1840-1926), this picture represents the Seine river at Argenteuil and is one of the numerous scenes of this small city that Monet used to paint in the 70s. It is an oil on canvas that measures 60x81 cm. Monet, with his powerful, ever alert eye, was able to paint at the same time brilliant pictures and also rather grayed ones in neutral tones. He was more reactive, he had more of that quality that psychologists of that time called "Impressionability", hence he is rifgthly considered as the leader of the Impressionists.He had a huge influence on painters like Degas, Cézanne, Pissarro and Renoir. This painting was sold in 1963 for $ 111,220.
The Expressionist movement in Germany embraced stylistic phenomena as disparate as the first abstract watercolors painted by Wassily Kandinsky around 1910 and the social criticism of the art of the Weimar period as here represented by this picture of young poet Walter Rheiner (1895-1925) committing suicide in 1925 in Berlin. This tragic event was painted with outstanding realism by Conrad Felixmuller. Felixmuller (1897-1977) was born in Dresden. In 1919 he became a founding member with Otto Dix of the Dresdner secession and a member of the November Group. In 1936, around 40 of his works were part of the Nazi exhibition "Degenerated Art. Felix Mueller was excluded from the Berlin Künstlerbund and all his pictures withdrewn from public collections. The Nazis destroyed from 1938 to 1939 a total of 151 of his works. From 1949 to 1962 Felix Mueller taught at the University of Halle.
His picture of the Death of the Poet Walter Rheiner was sold in 1981 for Mk 543,750 ($ 232,960). It is now part of the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum.
German born Martin Carlin (1730-1785) went to France to work as an ebenist and was neither very successful nor rich but he made a considerable amount of nice piece of furnitures which was mainly bought by the Rue du Fbg St Martin (Paris) furniture dealers of the time. 
