Going Once: 250 Years of Culture, Taste and Collecting at Christie’s is the book that will be launched on Oct 24, priced at £39.95, being published by Phaidon. Its publication is a way to commemorate the 250th anniversary of Christie’s, the world’s leading art business. The book charts the history of taste and collecting through the stories behind 250 iconic and often record-breaking sales, from Picasso’s Les femmes d’Alger (Version ‘O’) (1955) and Elizabeth Taylor’s jewellery collection to a London bus, Star Trek memorabilia and Pelé’s football shirt. The items featured in the book reflect the variety of masterpieces auctioned by Christie’s since 1766. Many of the items were auctioned in record-breaking sales that made news headlines. They include the Rothschild Fabergé Egg commissioned by the family in 1902 and sold over a century later for almost £9m ($19m) in 2007; Lucian Freud’s Benefits Supervisor Sleeping (1995), which, in 2008, became the most expensive painting by a living artist sold at auction when it was bought for $33.6m (£17.2m); and a dozen bottles of Château Pétrus 1945 that fetched £45,000 ($72,600) in 1997. Others are included for reasons other than fiscal, from romantic – Lord Nelson bought a portrait of his mistress Emma Hamilton so that no other man could own her likeness – to curiosity: the skeleton of a woolly mammoth, a meteorite that fell to earth in 1803, a Spitfire Mark I that was shot down and crashed on the beach at Calais and the golden typewriter on which Ian Fleming wrote some of the James Bond novels. Christie’s has auctioned the possessions of Marilyn Monroe, Princess Diana, Yves Saint Laurent, Margaret Thatcher and many others. The book demonstrates how world events and changes in society influenced the expansion of collecting.
