According to Carol Vogel and Peter Lattman in the NYT, Cohen is selling a Gerhard Richter [above] which he bought from the Pace Gallery last year, along with “about a dozen other pieces, mostly at Sotheby’s, that he acquired in recent years at art fairs and auctions”.

On top of Cohen’s works, Vogel has found other pieces being flipped this month, including Three Studies of Lucian Freud, by Francis Bacon, which “was purchased by a consortium from a private collector in Italy within the past 12 months”; and Apocalypse Now, by Christopher Wool, which was sold by David Ganek very recently. Between them, the Richter, the Bacon, and the Wool are going to account for a substantial percentage of the total amount of money spent at auction this season, which means that auction totals are increasingly comprised of short-term trades, as opposed to sales from individuals and families who have owned the objects for many years. [...]

It’s rare for people in the art world to buy a piece and then immediately consign it to auction. It’s common for works of art to be sold in the primary market for well below their auction value — but precisely because it is so common, there are lots of rules and protocols which mitigate against such things happening. When work is being sold at below-market rates, there’s naturally a lot of demand for it, which means that dealers can pick exactly which buyers they want. And if any buyer dares to flip such a work, he knows he’ll be blacklisted from then on in. Instead, if a buyer wants to sell a work he bought from a gallery, he always asks the gallery first.