not price clipped A Times Best Art Book of the Year, 2024 'A riot of a book' - Country Life's Books of the Year, 2024 The modern art market was born on a single night. On 15 October 1958 Sotheby's of Bond Street staged an 'event sale' of Impressionist paintings from the collection of an American banker, Erwin Goldschmidt: three Manets, two Czannes, one Van Gogh and a Renoir. Movie stars and other celebrities attended in black tie and saw the seven lots go for 781,000 - at the time the highest price for a single art sale. Overnight, London became the world centre of the art market and Sotheby's an international auction house. The event signalled a shift in power from dealers to auctioneers and pointed the way for Impressionist paintings to dominate the market for the next forty years. In this climate Sotheby's and Christie's became a great business duopoly - as aggressive, dominant and competitive in the field of art sales as Pepsi and Coca-Cola were in soft drinks. The resulting exp