THE GREAT SOTHEBY'S END OF YEAR QUIZ

A s 2022 wends its way to a close, we’re in mildly nostalgic mood. Aware this will not last long, we felt it timely to present you with a feast of fun in the form of a grand, end of year quiz, spanning the world of Sotheby’s in 2022. From racing cars to glittering gems, artists and collectors, pots, watches, NFT, gold boxes and statues, consider this a pick’n’mix of delicious delights culled from the past twelve months. And like any self-respecting selection of sweets, you’ll find here all manner of quizzical bonbons, from light and fluffy to dark and complex. So, dig in, wrack your brains (or our handy ‘Search’ function) and join us in bidding farewell to a year rich in action, adventure, beauty, and art. Answers at the bottom.

1. With a hammer price of €135 million – which will be donated to establish a scholarship fund – what was the single most expensive item sold by Sotheby’s in 2022?

1. Andy Warhol’s White Disaster [White Car Crash 19 Times]
2. Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR Uhlenhaut Coupé
3. René Magritte’s L’Empires des lumières
4. ‘The One’: a luxury house in Bel Air

2. RM Auto Restorations won the prestigious ‘Best in Show’ award during Monterey Car Week 2022 for their no-expense-spared restoration of a 1932 Model J Figoni Sports Torpedo, made by which automobile manufacturer?

1. Duesenberg
2. Hispano-Suiza
3. Ford
4. Talbot-Lago

3. Lovingly known as ‘Butzi’, Ferdinand Alexander was the third-generation automobile designer who led the development of which iconic car, produced by his family business:

1. Mercedes-Benz AMG
2. Porsche 911
3. Ferrari 166MM
4. Bentley Blower

4. Dubbed ‘the best Ferrari ever made’ by Enzo Ferrari himself, the 1955 410 Sport Spider was custom built for a single five-day race by which legendary designer?

1. Sergio Pininfarina
2. Sergio Scaglietti
3. Battista Farina
4. Marcello Gandini

5. Custom-built in 1924 for the heir of the Dubonnet aperitif fortune, this Hispano-Suiza H6C was given a unique name to honor its lightweight wooden coachwork, made using aircraft construction methods – despite the fact that the car is actually made of mahogany!

1. ‘The Rosewood Rocket’
2. ‘The Maple Missile’
3. ‘The Balsa Bomber’
4. ‘The Tulipwood Torpedo’

6. Which British national treasure gave a talk at Sotheby’s London in June with historian Robert Hardman as part of the Jubilee Week celebrations for Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II?

1. Joanna Lumley
2. Olivia Colman
3. Jilly Cooper
4. Floella Benjamin

7. During autumn/winter 2022, over 1,000 lots from an exceptional private collection of classical works of art, from the Hôtel Lambert in Paris, were sold in a series of auctions. The Hôtel Lambert was built in the early 1640s, for the financier Jean-Baptiste Lambert. Of the following, who hasn’t been one of the villa’s eminent owners?

1. The Rothschild family
2. Kanye West
3. Voltaire
4. His Highness Sheikh Hamad Bin Abdullah Al Thani

8. The Birkin bag, one of the most iconic accessories of the past 40 years and one of our most sought-after Buy Now gifts this year, was inspired by the actress Jane Birkin doing what?

1. Struggling with her inflight bags while sitting next to Executive Chairman of Hermès, Jean-Louis Dumas, on a plane
2. Getting into a fight with Serge Gainsbourg in a Paris nightclub during the 1984 launch of Rouge Hermès?
3. Performing a concert with Jean-Michel Jarre by the Pyramids in Giza, Egypt, in 1979?
4. Spotted by Hermes creative duo Octave Marsal and Théo de Gueltz walking along the Seine on a summer day.

9. Making Constructivist compositions with a plotter, this artist was one of the earliest to use a computer in her practice. Now 98 and considered a forebear of today’s Generative Art movement, she revisited a series of early works as NFT this year. Who is she?

1. Beryl Korot
2. Vera Molnár
3. Alison Knowles
4. Agnes Denes

10. The world’s first auction dedicated to a single collector of NFT, featured work owned by which digital visionary?

1. Cozomo de’ Medici
2. @houseofhabsburg
3. MaxStealth
4. MinimumVisibility

11. Footballer Johan Cruyff’s ‘phantom goal’ was immortalized as a single-edition NFT in 2022. What club team did the forward, known as ‘The Flying Dutchman’, play for when he scored that memorable goal?

1. Bayern München
2. Ajax Amsterdam
3. FC Barcelona
4. Feyenoord Rotterdam

12. On 23 June, former Wu-Tang Clan member Method Man performed at Sotheby’s alongside an intact skeleton of which dinosaur, whose name translates to ‘dreadful lizard’?

1. Gorgosaurus
2. Tyrannosaurus rex
3. Triceratops
4. Lizarius Dreadfulania

13. In March 2022, Sotheby’s London sold Monet’s Nymphéas, dating from between 1914–17. It comes from one of Monet’s most experimental periods in his journey from Impressionism to abstraction, focusing on his explorations of the ponds in his extensive gardens. But in which French town was his famous home?

1. Lyon
2. Giverny
3. Aix-en-Provence
4. Grenoble

14. Which artist, who died in 2022, was famed for their series ‘Dog Women’?

1. Paula Rego
2. Carmen Herrera
3. Jean-Luc Godard
4. Dorothy Iannone

15. This impressive, round-footed bowl by Dame Lucie Rie was a star lot in the September 2022 ‘Made in Britain’ auction. While the bowl was made in Britain, where was Rie born?

1. Colchester
2. Cologne
3. Devizes
4. Vienna

16. Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon enjoyed a close and mutually influential friendship over many years, generating works such as Bacon’s Study for Portrait of Lucian Freud (1964) which sold for £43,336,000 as part of ‘British Art: The Jubilee Auction’ on 29 June. The pair had been introduced to each other by a mutual friend, whom Freud had asked to name the best painter in the country. ‘Oh, someone you’ve never heard of,’ replied the friend, speaking of Bacon. ‘He’s like a cross between Vuillard and Picasso; he’s never shown, and he has the most extraordinary life.’ Who was the friend?

1. Sir Kenneth Clark
2. Stephen Spender
3. Henrietta Moraes
4. Graham Sutherland

17. Claude Monet made only one trip to this Italian city in his lifetime, yet while there, he painted 37 of his most important late works – including one painting that sold for $56.6 million at Sotheby’s in May. Which city was it?

1. Venice
2. Rome
3. Florence
4. Sienna

18. Born in 1938, this influential 20th-century painter of popular Black culture was once declared ‘the most expressive painter of sports since George Bellows’.

1. Jacob Lawrence
2. Archibald Motley
3. Romare Bearden
4. Ernie Barnes

19. Which Hollywood writer-director released a TV series about Andy Warhol and guest-curated an auction at Sotheby’s this year?

1. Michael Bay
2. Shonda Rhimes
3. Ryan Murphy
4. Robert Pattinson

20. According to the actor Robert Pattinson, Batman’s billionaire alter ego Bruce Wayne would probably collect work by which legendary artist?

1. Francis Bacon
2. Jeff Koons
3. Louise Nevelson
4. Lucio Fontana

21. Prized for her lustrous portraits of the Jazz Age élite and nouveau riche – such as the Duchesse de la Salle – which artist is best known for her 1928 self-portrait as a femme fatale driving a green Bugatti?

1. Tamara de Lempicka
2. Sonia Delaunay
3. Rrose Sélavy
4. Gerda Wegener

22. A friend of Mark Rothko, and known as America’s answer to Henri Matisse, which painter of colourful portraits and near-abstract landscapes achieved an auction record when a 1945 painting of his daughter, March, sold for $6.1 million in May?

1. Arthur Garfield Dove
2. Marsden Hartley
3. Paul Cadmus
4. Milton Avery

23. Who painted The Man of Sorrows, which led January’s Masters Week at $45.4 million? He was a major artist of the Italian Renaissance, in part due to his The Birth of Venus (1485–86) which is one of the most important works at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. (Yet apparently he wasn’t important enough to be named a Ninja Turtle.)

1. Michelangelo
2. Raphael
3. Botticelli
4. Donatello

24. One of a few women painters to rise the ranks of male-dominated Baroque Italy, this 17th-century artist, whose Portrait of Seated Lady (1620) sold for $2.7 million, was known for her mastery of chiaroscuro, a high-contrast technique that she learned from her father, who in turn closely studied Caravaggio.

1. Sofonisba Anguissola
2. Artemisia Gentileschi
3. Elisabetta Sirani
4. Rosalba Carriera

25. Alexandre Iolas, celebrated in the May 2022 sale ‘Collection André Mourgues, Alexandre Iolas et ses artistes’, organised the very first and decades later, amongst the very last, exhibitions of which artist? 

1. Roy Lichtenstein
2. Francis Bacon
3. Andy Warhol
4. Robert Rauschenberg

26. This March, Sotheby’s in London sold a Surrealist masterpiece by Magritte, L’Empire des lumieres, for £59,422,000 ($79.8 million). The painting, a view of a Belgian street, is said to have inspired a key scene in which well-known 1970s film?

1. The Godfather
2. Jaws
3. Herbie Goes Bananas
4. The Exorcist

27. Which British contemporary artist, featured in the ‘Now Auction’ in March 2022 finds inspiration in 18th-century masterworks by the likes of François Boucher, Nicolas Lancret, Jean-Honoré Fragonard and Jean-Antoine Watteau?

1. Caroline Walker
2. Jadé Fadojutimi
3. Flora Yukhnovich
4. Elizabeth Peyton

28. This year’s inaugural Sotheby’s Impact Gala was held in support of Instituto Terra, a nonprofit combating deforestation in Brazil’s Atlantic Forest. Which artist founded the organization?

1. Vik Muniz
2. Tarsila do Amaral
3. Sebastião Salgado
4. Lyga Clarke

29. Most people may think of this American artist as a painter. Yet in April, one of his photographs of nude men boxing sold for a record $327,600. Who is he?

1. George Bellows
2. Eadweard Muybridge
3. Winslow Homer
4. Thomas Eakins

30. The subject of a current museum retrospective, this German artist had three works in the ‘Contemporary Photographs’ auction this autumn, including a portrait of fashion model Kate Moss holding a head of broccoli:

1. Sibylle Bergmann
2. Uta Barth
3. Wolfgang Tillmans
4. Helmut Newton

31. Nike collaborated with this French fashion house, directed by the late designer Virgil Abloh, on the release and sale of a new line of record-setting Air Force 1s this year:

1. Chanel
2. Louis Vuitton
3. Comme des Garçons
4. Hermès

32. When it sold for $10.1 million in September, which basketball player’s jersey from his 1998 ‘Last Dance’ season with the Chicago Bulls became the most valuable piece of game-worn sports memorabilia, breaking a record set by Diego Maradona’s ‘Hand of God’ jersey [above], set just months earlier?

1. Dennis Rodman
2. Kobe Bryant
3. Shaquile O’Neal
4. Michael Jordan

33. Which American whiskey boasts an uninterrupted provenance spanning the Whiskey Rebellion and Prohibition?

1. Old Overholt
2. Elijah Craig
3. Old Rip Van Winkle
4. Colonel E.H. Taylor, Jr.

34. A founder of Yamazaki distillery, Masataka Taketsuru spent three years studying chemistry and whisky-making in this country:

1. United States
2. Canada
3. Ireland
4. Scotland

35. Widely considered one of the best wines in the world, Petrus is made with which grape variety, famously ridiculed by Paul Giamatti’s character Miles Raymond in Sideways?

1. Merlot
2. Chardonnay
3. Pinot Noir
4. Concord

36. An indispensable Napa Valley winemaker is known for defying methods, recipes and styles in their attempt to capture the unique spirit of each California season. After which Latin phrase are they named?

1. Ad Astra Per Aspera
2. Sine Qua Non
3. In Vino Veritas
4. Cogito, Ergo Sum

37. A charity auction benefiting The PolG Foundation, which supports medical research into rare mitochondrial diseases, featured wines from the private cellar of H.R.H Prince Robert, of which country?

1. Monaco
2. Lichtenstein
3. Andorra
4. Luxembourg

38. A trendsetter in the growing demand for salmon-dialed watches, which member of the Swiss watch-making ‘holy trinity’ manufactured a Ref. 1518A chronograph, once owned by the Prince of Egypt (sold at Sotheby’s for $9.6 million in 2018) and a Ref. 5970G-019 perpetual calendar chronograph (sold for $1.3 million – 650 percent of its high estimate – in September 2022)?

1. Audemars Piguet
2. Patek Philippe
3. Vacheron Constantin
4. A. Lange & Söhne

39. The sale of which Swiss watchmaker’s personal Audemars Piguet Royal Oak – a timepiece he designed, along with the Patek Philippe Nautilus – was preceded by previously unseen drawings and diagrams editioned as NFTs?

1. F. P. Journe
2. Gérald Genta
3. Abraham-Louis Breguet
4. Jules Louis Audemars

40. In 1913, which jewelry brand launched Dame à la Panthère, an iconic advertising campaign featuring an elegant model adorned with long sautoir necklaces and pearls with a sleek black panther at her feet?

1. Bulgari
2. Ratners
3. Cartier
4. Van Cleef & Arpels

41. The flawless, 11.5-carat Williamson Pink Star diamond fetched HK$453.2 million (US$58 million) in a single-lot sale in Hong Kong this October, not only nearly doubling the global per-carat record for a Fancy Vivid pink diamond, but also setting a new world record per carat price for any diamond or gemstone. But in which country was the first known Pink Diamond discovered?

1. Angola
2. South Africa
3. Tanzania
4. India

42. In September, Sotheby’s New York held an auction titled ‘Art into Jewelry, Jewelry Into Art’, featuring recent and historical examples of work created in collaboration between artists and jewelers. Which 20th-century artist was considered the first Modern artist to experiment with making jewelry, decorating the Paris boutique of couturier Elsa Schiaparelli and making brooches, bracelets and buttons for her to sell?

1. Pablo Picasso
2. Alberto Giacometti
3. Man Ray
4. Salvador Dalí

43. A diamond tiara created in 1767 for the Viscountess Montagu, with heart-shaped scrolls, flowers and a flowing garland design, was worn by who on her wedding day?

1. Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II
2. Meghan Markle
3. Victoria Beckham
4. Diana, Princess of Wales

44. According to Andrew Coxon, President of De Beers Institute of Diamonds, the youngest possible diamond is already 700 million years old. How old does he estimate the oldest could be?

1. 3.5 billion years old
2. 1 billion years old
3. 7.5 million years old
4. 900 million years old

45. Dating from early 17th-century France, drageoirs were small, highly-decorated vessels designed to hold – what?

1. Precious gemstones
2. Sweets
3. Earrings
4. Nail clippers

46. Included in the July ‘Books & Manuscripts’ sale in London were two original drawings by British illustrator E.H. Shepherd, from A A Milne’s Winnie The Pooh books. What was the name of the dolorous donkey featured in the drawings?

1. Kanga
2. Tigger
3. Eeyore
4. Pooh

47. The Sex Pistols legacy lived on this year with the sale of the Stolper-Wilson collection of memorabilia and ephemera in London during October. Who was the designer who created much of the now-iconic lettering and collage-style graphics that defined the band’s aesthetic?

1. Vivienne Westwood
2. Peter Savile
3. Storm Thorgeson
4. Jamie Reid

48. The late critic Peter Schjeldahl, in an essay for The New Yorker, is quoted here eulogising which artist, who had a major work in the New York evening auction in November 2022? ‘Gravity is key, the force that urges everything on Earth towards horizontality. In regard to that, a diagonal is a mere anecdote: something propped up or toppling. Verticality is how, standing, we stalemate gravity, with autonomic, tiny adjustments of balance…’

1. Mark Rothko
2. Piet Mondrian
3. Pablo Picasso
4. Jackson Pollock

49. London-based silversmith Theo Fennell was part of the ‘A Toast to Sport’ auction in December 2022. What links Theo to Her Majesty The Queen Consort?

1. He was commissioned to create a silver brooch for her
2. He is distantly related to her by marriage
3. His daughter Emerald portrayed her in a season of ‘The Crown’
4. He taught her the rudiments of silversmithery

50. The 'Lemon Paul Newman' Rolex Daytona, Ref. 6264, a yellow gold chronograph wristwatch, sold in London for £1,003,000 in September. This incredibly desirable timepiece was the last Daytona Rolex reference to include:

1. A set of lume plots
2. The 'Exotic' Lemon dial
3. Pump pushers
4. An 18k yellow gold Rolex pin buckle