Posthumous Sales
In December 1999, Polo Crowd, a 1910 painting, sold for U.S. $27.5 million to billionaire Bill Gates. In November 2008, Bellows's Men of the Docks, a 1912 painting of the Brooklyn docks spanning the East River and depicting the Manhattan skyline in the background, was to be auctioned at Christie's in New York. It was expected to set the record for an American painting sold at auction with an estimate of $25–35 million. The painting's sale however was a source of controversy at Randolph College because it was the first masterpiece purchased for the Maier Museum of Art by students and locals who scraped together $2,500 to purchase it in 1920. Due to a series of lawsuits and the deflated art market, the painting remains unsold.
Randolph College was asked by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., to lend Men of the Docks to be shown in the first comprehensive exhibition of the Bellow’s prolific career in three decades.
In 2001, Thomas French Fine Art became the exclusive agent of the George Bellows Family Trust.
Read more about this topic: George Bellows
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