Tobacco Group's Art Collection Fetches Record Price

Source from:  AFP 03/10/2010

An art collection put together by British American Tobacco over five decades to liven up its factories and "inspire" workers was sold for a Dutch record 13.6 million euros, Sotheby's said Tuesday. "The results represent the highest total ever achieved (18.5 million dollars) in the Netherlands for a sale of fine art," the auction house said in a statement after Monday's sale in Amsterdam. The 163 works of art that make up the Peter Stuyvesant Collection, the largest collection of post-war and contemporary art ever to go on sale in the Netherlands, had been valued at about four million euros before the auction. The top lot was German artist Martin Kippenberger's Dinosaurierei (Dinosaur Egg), an oil on canvas that fetched 1.07 million euros, more than three times the expected price, said Sotheby's. The collection was started by businessman Alexander Orlow, who in 1960 invited 13 artists from 13 European countries to create paintings for the production hall of his Turmac tobacco company in the Netherlands, later bought by British American Tobacco. Expanded over the next 50 years, the collection included works by Dutch painters Karel Appel and Jan Schoonhoven, French artist Niki de Saint-Phalle, Hungarian Victor Vasarely and Venezuela's Jesus Rafael Soto. Many of the works had been storage since British American Tobacco started closing some of the European factories that used to display them. Enditem