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The story
History
Beginnings (18th and 19th century)
Sotheby's was established on 11 March 1744 in London by Samuel Baker, a bookseller. In 1767 the firm became Baker & Leigh, after Samuel Baker auctioned several hundred valuable books from the library of The Rt Hon Sir John Stanley, 1st Baronet, of Grangegorman and became business partners with George Leigh. The library Napoleon took with him into exile at St Helena, as well as the library collections of John Wilkes, Benjamin Heywood Bright and the Dukes of Devonshire and of Buckingham (both related to George Leigh), were sold through Samuel Baker's auctions.
After Baker's death in 1778, the business was left to Leigh and his nephew John Sotheby, where it became a prominent book auction house and was renamed Leigh and Sotheby.
George Leigh died in 1816, but not before recruiting Samuel E Leigh into the business. Under the Sotheby family, the auction house extended its activities to auctioning prints, medals, and coins. John Wilkinson, Sotheby's senior accountant, became a partner and eventually the company's new head of the company when the last member of the Sotheby family died in 1861.
20th century
The business did not seek to auction fine arts initially. Their first major success in this field was the sale of a Frans Hals painting for nine thousand guineas in 1913.
Other former names include: Leigh, Sotheby and Wilkinson; Sotheby, Wilkinson and Hodge (1864–1924); Sotheby and Company (1924–83); Mssrs Sotheby; Sotheby & Wilkinson; Sotheby Mak van Waay; and Sotheby's & Co. In 1917, Sotheby's relocated from 13 Wellington Street to 34–35 New Bond Street, which remains as its London base. They soon came to rival Christie's as leaders of the London auction market, which capitalised on the arts.
In 1964, Sotheby's purchased Parke-Bernet, the largest auctioneer of fine art in the United States at the time. In the following year, Sotheby's moved to 980 Madison Avenue, New York. With the international fine art auction industry growing, Sotheby's opened offices in Paris and Los Angeles in 1967, and became the first auction house to operate in Hong Kong in 1973, and Moscow in 1988.
As well as numerous high-profile real-life auctions being held at Sotheby's, the firm's auctioneers have also been used in various films, including the 1983 James Bond film Octopussy.
In 1988 they introduced a Decorative Arts Award which showed in exhibitions in London and Tokyo. It is fair to say that not all commentators welcomed the move dismissing some exhibits as Crafts. However, several notable people were amongst the participants. Michael Rowe (silversmith) was the winner of the Decorative Arts Award in1988 and a detail of the Tapestry Soft Flight by Mary Farmer graced the catalogue cover. The tapestry Soft Flight Is now in the Collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum.
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With private transactions constituting an essential and increasingly profitable business segment, through the years Sotheby's has bought art galleries and helped dealers finance purchases. It has also gone into partnership with dealers on private sales. In 1990, Sotheby's teamed up with dealer William Acquavella, to form Acquavella Modern Art, a Nevada general partnership and a subsidiary of Sotheby's Holding Company. The subsidiary paid $143 million for the contents of the Pierre Matisse Gallery in Manhattan, which included about 2,300 works by artists including Miró, Jean Dubuffet, Alberto Giacometti, and Marc Chagall, and began selling the works both at auction and privately.
In 1996, Sotheby's acquired Andre Emmerich Gallery to operate a division called Emmerich/Sotheby's, As a consequence, the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, the main beneficiary of the artists' estates, as well as the estates of Morris Louis and Milton Avery announced that they would not renew their Emmerich contracts. That decision came right after it was disclosed that Sotheby's had decided to close Emmerich's prime space at 41 East 57th Street, and that its artists would be handled out of Deitch Projects. Sotheby's subsequently closed Andre Emmerich in 1998.
In 1997, Sotheby's purchased a 50% interest in Deitch Projects but later sold its share back to Jeffrey Deitch. In 1997, it also bought Leslie Hindman Auctioneers in Chicago; by 2001, it stopped holding auctions in the city.
In 2006, Sotheby's acquired a Dutch dealership, Noortman Master Paintings, from its owner, Robert Noortman, for $82.5 million ($56.5 million worth of Sotheby's stock and assumption of more than $26 million in gallery debt, including $11.7 million owed to the auction house). Sotheby's and Noortman had collaborated before in 1995, when the sales of Dutch plastic millionaire Joost Ritman were divided between the two companies. Already in 1990, Sotheby's New York had successfully lobbied for a zoning change permitting the construction of a 27-story residential tower above the five-story headquarters; this expansion was never realised. Instead, Sotheby's throughout the 1990s expressed interest in sites that ranged from the old Alexander's building on East 59th Street to the New York Coliseum site on Columbus Circle, and was even considering moving into the old B. Altman Building on Fifth Avenue.
21st century
The company eventually bought its York Avenue building for $11 million in 2000 and completed a $140 million expansion and renovation in 2001, adding six floors and 240,000 square feet. The renovation added the capability to store works on the same premises as the specialist departments, galleries, and auction spaces. Sotheby's New York's offices also house Sotheby's Wine and the former Bid (an American contemporary restaurant and later bistro), which was closed due to poor attendance. The company sold the building in 2002 for $175 million. In May 2007, Sotheby's opened an office in Moscow in response to rapidly growing interest among Russian buyers in the international art market and held sales in Qatar in 2009.
As many industries took a blow from the economic crisis of 2008, the art market also saw a contraction. In international figures, art prices fell by 7.5% in Q1 of 2008 in comparison to the previous quarter. In September and October 2008, major auction houses saw a sharp decline in sales: artprice.com, the world leader in art market information, coined the term "Black October". Sotheby's bought-in rate was 27%, Christie's was 45% and Phillips de Pury's was 46%. However, the total values of global and United States Fine Art auction sales were US$8.3 billion and US$2.9 billion, respectively. In 2009, art collector Steven A. Cohen built a 6 percent stake in the auction house for his hedge fund SAC Capital Advisors.
In 2011, Noortman's Amsterdam space was closed and the gallery moved to London. Two years later, Sotheby's closed Noortmans, after having written down $8.3 million of inventory and started selling off lower-valued works of art through other auction houses. As of 2021, Sotheby's is present in over 40 countries, with 80 locations. In 2012, the company signed a 10-year joint-venture agreement to form Sotheby's (Beijing) Auction Co. Ltd., the first international auction house in China; under the agreement, it invested $1.2 million to take an 80 percent stake in the venture with state-owned Beijing Gehua Cultural Development Group.
As of 2012, the firm had an annual revenue of approximately US$831.8 million and offices on Manhattan's York Avenue and London's New Bond Street.
Sotheby's shares a rivalry with Christie's for the position of the world's pre-eminent fine art auctioneer, a title of much subjectivity. In August 2004, Sotheby's introduced an online system – MySotheby's – allowing clients to track lots and create "wishlists" that could be automatically updated as new works became available. Sotheby's also created the BIDnow service, which allows bidders to bid real-time online while watching the broadcast auctions, with the exception of Wine auctions. LiveBid is Sotheby's online bidding system exclusively for wine auctions.
In the meantime, income from classic auctioneering has fallen, as Sotheby's reported a decrease of 42% in net income in the first half of 2012.
In February 2015 Sotheby's acquired a 25% stake in classic and vintage automobile auctioneer RM Auctions.
In March 2015, Tad Smith, former president and chief executive of New York's Madison Square Garden, succeeded William F. Ruprecht as CEO of Sotheby's. Smith had no experience in the auction industry but had overseen a doubling of profits during his time at Madison Square Garden. In 2015, the auction house's longest-serving auctioneer, David Redden, and vice-chairman retired.
In 2016, the company spent $50 million on Art Agency Partners, run by Amy Cappellazzo, Allan Schwartzman and Adam Chinn. The price was shared among the trio, as well as $35 million performance-related bonus. The five-year contract expired in 2021.
In July 2016, Chinese insurance company Taikang Life became Sotheby's largest shareholder, with a 13.5% stake.
On 25 January 2018, Sotheby's acquired the AI company Thread Genius for an undisclosed amount.
In February 2019, Sotheby's announced a redesign and expansion of its New York headquarters on the Upper East Side that is being led by the designer Shohei Shigematsu of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA). The exhibition space there will grow to over 90,000 square feet from 67,000, and the project will include the addition of several new galleries. The company also launched a new online bidding platform on its website.
In June 2019, Sotheby's was acquired by French-Israeli businessman Patrick Drahi at a 61% market premium. In October 2019, he brought in Charles F. Stewart as Sotheby's new CEO, and former CEO Tad Smith transitioned to an advisory role. Drahi instituted a number of cost-cutting measures, including senior executive layoffs in 2019; job cuts, salary cuts, and a move to online auctions during the 2020 pandemic; and announcing an end to Sotheby's employee pension plan in 2022.
In 2020, Sotheby's overtook Christie's as the world's top auction house for the first time since 2011, with over $5 billion in aggregate sales compared to its rival's $4.4 billion.
As of late 2021, Drahi's son, Nathan Drahi, was the managing director of Sotheby's Asia.
In June 2023, Sotheby's agreed to purchase 945 Madison Avenue, a former museum building designed by Marcel Breuer, to house the company's headquarters, including its galleries, exhibition space, and auction room. The company plans to open its new space in 2025.
History of public and private ownership
Sotheby's became a UK public company in 1977. In 1980, after a drop in sales, Sotheby's relocated its North American headquarters from Madison Avenue to a former cigar factory at 1334 York Avenue, New York. In 1982, the auction house closed its Madison Avenue galleries at East 76th Street, and its Los Angeles galleries were sold and West Coast auctions moved to New York.
In 1983, a group of investors including American millionaire Alfred Taubman purchased and privatized Sotheby's. Sotheby's was initially incorporated as Sotheby's Holdings, Inc. in Michigan in August 1983.
In 1988, Taubman took Sotheby's public and listed the company's shares on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), making Sotheby's the oldest publicly traded company on the NYSE under the ticker symbol "BID". In June 2006, Sotheby's Holdings, Inc. reincorporated in the State of Delaware and was renamed Sotheby's shortly after.
In 2019 Sotheby's was acquired by Patrick Drahi for $3.7 billion, becoming again a private company and no longer trading on the NYSE.
In 2024 the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund ADIA acquired a minority stake in Sotheby's, with a total investment of approximately $1 billion in the house.
From Wikipedia’s article on Sotheby's, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.6