page_title: Sotheby's
section_title: Public company
hierarchical_section_title: Sotheby's / History / Public company
caption_attribution_description: English: Rainy London in March
context_page_description: Sotheby's is a British-founded American multinational corporation headquartered in New York City. One of the world's largest brokers of fine and decorative art, jewelry, real estate, and collectibles, Sotheby's operation is divided into three segments: auction, finance, and dealer. The company's services range from corporate art services to private sales. It is named after one of its cofounders, John Sotheby.
  Sotheby's is the world's fourth oldest auction house in continuous operation, with 80 locations in 40 countries. As of December 2011, the company had 1,446 employees worldwide. It is the world's largest art business, with global sales in 2011 totalling $5.8 billion.
  Sotheby's was established on 11 March 1744 in London. The American holding company was initially incorporated in August 1983 in Michigan. In June 2006, Sotheby's Holdings, Inc. reincorporated in the State of Delaware and was renamed Sotheby's. In July 2016, Chinese insurance company Taikang Life became Sotheby's largest shareholder. Sotheby's maintains a significant presence in the UK, and its UK operation is headed by Lord Dalmeny.
context_section_description: 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. The auction house closed its Madison Avenue galleries at East 76th Street. The Los Angeles galleries were sold and West Coast auctions moved to New York.
  The following year, 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, 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.
  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 such artists as 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, and in 1997 it purchased a 50% interest in Deitch Projects. 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 and later sold its share in Deitch Projects back to Jeffrey Deitch. 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. 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 prev
caption: Sotheby's office on New Bond Street, London.
exif: {"Image ImageDescription": "", "Image Make": "SONY", "Image Model": "DSC-TX5", "Image XResolution": "72", "Image YResolution": "72", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Picasa", "Image DateTime": "2014:05:04 13:07:31", "Image Artist": "Picasa", "Image YCbCrPositioning": "Co-sited", "Image ExifOffset": "282", "Image PrintIM": "[80, 114, 105, 110, 116, 73, 77, 0, 48, 51, 48, 48, 0, 0, 2, 0, 2, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0]", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "10926", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "6631", "EXIF ExposureTime": "1/160", "EXIF FNumber": "7/2", "EXIF ExposureProgram": "Program Normal", "EXIF ISOSpeedRatings": "160", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0221", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "2013:03:09 12:35:21", "EXIF DateTimeDigitized": "2013:03:09 12:35:21", "EXIF ComponentsConfiguration": "YCbCr", "EXIF CompressedBitsPerPixel": "4", "EXIF ExposureBiasValue": "0", "EXIF MaxApertureValue": "29/8", "EXIF MeteringMode": "Pattern", "EXIF LightSource": "Unknown", "EXIF Flash": "Flash did not fire, compulsory flash mode", "EXIF FocalLength": "443/100", "EXIF FlashPixVersion": "0100", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "2203", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "3051", "Interoperability InteroperabilityIndex": "R98", "Interoperability InteroperabilityVersion": "[48, 49, 48, 48]", "Interoperability RelatedImageWidth": "3648", "Interoperability RelatedImageLength": "2736", "EXIF InteroperabilityOffset": "10778", "EXIF FileSource": "Digital Camera", "EXIF SceneType": "Directly Photographed", "EXIF CustomRendered": "Normal", "EXIF ExposureMode": "Auto Exposure", "EXIF WhiteBalance": "Auto", "EXIF SceneCaptureType": "Standard", "EXIF Contrast": "Normal", "EXIF Saturation": "Normal", "EXIF Sharpness": "Normal", "EXIF ImageUniqueID": "32f63c30a985ad30ea0f5d5e42c36bac"}