Lehman Brothers art sold sold for $12m in US

An auction of fine art from the New York offices of collapsed investment bank Lehman Brothers has raised more than $12m (£7.6m) at Sotheby’s.

The proceeds will go towards paying Lehman’s creditors, owed $600bn since the firm’s collapse in 2008.

On Wednesday art from Lehman’s extensive European collection will be auctioned at Christie’s in London.

Top sellers in New York included work by Ethiopian artist Julie Mehretu and an oil painting by Liu Ye of China.

Mehretu’s ink and acrylic work, entitled Untitled 1, sold for a little more than $1m (£640,000.) Liu’s oil painting The Long Way Home went for $962,500 (£615,606).

Both works set records for the artists.

However, a work by British artist Damien Hirst – entitled We’ve Got Style (The Vessel Collection – Blue/Green) – failed to sell after being expected to fetch about $1m.

The proceeds from the sales in both New York and London will go towards repaying the creditors of the investment bank, which was the biggest bankruptcy in US corporate history when it collapsed in September 2008.

Works by Lucien Freud and Gary Hume are in the company’s European collection, which is to be sold for an estimated £2m ($3.13m) by Christie’s in London.

A company sign from its offices in Canary Wharf, London, will be among the objects sold in London, as will Lehman Brothers cigar boxes and tea caddies.

With an estimated value of up to £150,000 ($243,530), an image of a New York stock exchange by photographer Andreas Gursky will be sold separately in October.

Source: BBC