Meet the Specialists

By Gord Duff
President, RM Sotheby’s

The automotive land-speed record has existed nearly as long as the automobile itself, beginning with a breakneck 39.24-mph run laid down in France in 1898. In the 20th century, setting new land-speed records became a matter of personal, and often national, pride, with French, Belgian, British and American contenders vying to crack the 100-, 200-and 300-mph barriers.

But the battle for extreme velocity truly accelerated, so to speak, when California native and former firefighter Craig Breedlove achieved 407.447 mph in his original Spirit of America in August 1963. Previous record-setting machines had used a range of power plants, but all ultimately put power to the ground through driven wheels. Breedlove’s sleek craft was propelled solely by thrust from a GE J47 turbojet engine, as used on the F-86 Sabre fighter plane. On Utah’s Bonneville Salt Flats, land speed had entered its Jet Age.

Breedlove’s reign as the King of Speed was soon challenged by brothers Walt and Art Arfons, however, who respectively fielded the Wingfoot Express and Green Monster jet cars with great success. His retort was the car offered here: the Spirit of America Sonic I. With a name that suggested an ambitious goal—the sound barrier—the Sonic I diverged substantially from the dartlike, three-wheeled Spirit of America. The four-wheeled Sonic I was built around a “Coke bottle”-shaped fuselage body over 34 feet in length; this cradled a more powerful GE J79 turbojet (such as that found on the F-4 Phantom II interceptor) producing a stated 15,000 pounds of thrust with afterburner. Goodyear, the effort’s major sponsor, provided special tires for the forged aluminum wheels, as well as disc brakes; an aerospace-style drag chute provided additional stopping power. The cockpit even incorporated an onboard air-supply system for the driver.

On November 2, 1965, Breedlove drove the Sonic I to a record-breaking 555.485 mph at Bonneville, but this fell less than a week later to Art Arfons in his Green Monster. Breedlove responded on November 15 by piloting his machine to 600.601 mph, becoming the first man to cross the 600 mph threshold. Notably, Breedlove’s wife, Lee, subsequently became the fastest woman alive when she drove the Sonic I to 308.506 mph, though some reports suggest that the primary purpose of her run was to monopolize the salt flats for the day and prevent one of his competitors from making a record attempt.

Although Breedlove planned further land-speed record attempts, none came to fruition. His 1965 record would stand until October 1970 and no car would shatter the sound barrier until the ThrustSSC’s 763 mph run in 1997. Importantly, the Sonic I is, therefore, also the car in which Breedlove made the fastest land-speed run of his illustrious career.

With its record runs behind it, the Sonic I came under the care of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Museum in 1975. It has been exhibited occasionally, including at the Daytona International Speedway in 1980 and at the then-newly opened Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles, California, in 1995, and remains a visually commanding and technologically fascinating piece of speed-record history.

Available for private acquisition for the very first time since its creation, Craig Breedlove’s Spirit of America Sonic I would be a monumental addition to any collection with a focus on speed and its pursuit. It is a unique testament to American ingenuity and the product of an optimistic era in which anything seemed possible—with the records to prove that on the Bonneville Salt Flats, just about anything was.

By Ottilie Windsor
Senior Director, Head of Contemporary Art, Sotheby’s U.K.

Towards the end of the 1950s, as American thought leaders were combining a shiny new form of capitalism with paranoid McCarthyism, a group of European artists, collectively traumatized by the legacy of two world wars, came together to search for a new beginning.

The Zero group, as they became known, wanted to create art that was collaborative with focus on materiality and structure. They harnessed elemental forces—fire, air and light—and expanded on the optimism of the burgeoning space age, filling the cultural vacuum wrought by the campaign against fascism.

In 1963, at the height of the movement, Italian Enrico Castellani made this untitled work that concisely embodies the founding principles of this radical movement. It is an ideal, early example of his “Superficie” (surface) series, the works that would make him famous around the globe. A monochromatic canvas realized in ferocious, primary red is stretched taut across a stylized grid of nails, like skin across a skeleton.

The object (with its three dimensions, this is a better term for the work than simply “a painting”) achieves that which only the very best works of art can: it speaks with more than words, conjuring connections between past horrors, all the while using a language of the future—of bright pop-infused primary colors, of space-age hardware, of minimalism. Castellani offers us a way to understand and focus on the material from which his work is made while marveling at a form of beauty and symmetry that transcends the physical. It pushes itself into space and finds rhythm and harmony in the intervention.

This remarkable creation has always been particularly articulate; the curators of the seminal 2015 “ZERO: Countdown to Tomorrow” exhibition at New York’s Guggenheim Museum used it as the poster image to promote the show worldwide. It was in this context that I first encountered the piece and began puzzling over the mysteries of its inspiration. The architectural peaks and troughs seem to suggest ambitions beyond even the moon, to the surface of her more distant solar companion—the red planet, Mars.

These far-reaching aspirations are what captivate me. Post-war art is defined by its designs on the future. Possessing the imagination to see beyond one’s generation is rare, but rarer still is having the skill and commitment to build that ambition into something others can see, appreciate and even own. The courage of the Zero artists to create spaces and communities to share their ideas offers us all a path to follow. It brings me great comfort that in times of crisis, it is often artistic minds that lead the way. If this group of young people could look forward to an optimistic future and build galleries, exhibitions and objects that still challenge and engage us today, perhaps paths out of our current calamities do exist.

Art has always believed in the future and in community—this object tells me so. I can think of few things more powerful.

By Nicolas Chow
Chairman, Asia, Chairman and Worldwide Head of Asian Art

Sacred objects are transcendental, tools that facilitate one’s spiritual journey to a higher realm. Personal objects, through their physical proximity to someone, evoke a living presence. Ancient objects are as close as one can get to time travel. The Piprahwa gem relics are all of the above: a portal to another dimension, to another time and to the historical Buddha himself, Siddhartha Gautama, whose legacy has inspired and transformed lives for more than two millennia. The 1898 discovery of these gems, together with bone relics identified by an inscription as the corporeal remains of the Buddha, ranks among the most extraordinary archaeological discoveries of all time.

The late 19th century will be remembered as a momentous time in the history of archaeology. As Flinders Petrie set out to investigate biblical sites in Egypt and the Levant, thousands of miles east archaeologists were mapping the sacred geography of Buddhist India, closely retracing the footsteps of Chinese pilgrim monks of the first millennium. The first breakthrough was in 1896 with the excavation at Lumbini in Nepal of a pillar inscribed by the royal order of Mauryan King Ashoka (304-232 BCE), identifying the location as the birthplace of Buddha Shakyamuni.

William Claxton Peppé (1852-1936), an English estate manager, began to excavate the largest of several ancient mounds on land at Piprahwa in northern present-day Uttar Pradesh, India, near the Nepal border. Deep into the solid brick core, workers found a vaulted chamber consistent with Mauryan construction of the third century BCE. Inside were five reliquaries holding a magnificent group of offerings—close to 2,000 gem-stones and semiprecious stones, pearls, coral and patterned gold and silver sheets, together with bone and ash—all consistent with reliquary forms known from other important Mauryan Buddhist sites. A short inscription on one reliquary reads, “The receptacle of the relics of the blessed Buddha of the Shakyas [is the pious gift] of the brothers of Sukriti, jointly with their sisters, with their sons and their wives.”

Scholars agree that the first stupa at Piprahwa was built upon the Buddha’s death around 400 BCE and rebuilt at the time of King Ashoka around 240 BCE, when the Lumbini pillar was erected. The reliquaries and the gem relics date to around this later time, when the bones of the Buddha were reinterred.

News of the discovery at Piprahwa reached a Thai monk, the Ven. P.C. Jinavaravansa (1851-1935), who promptly visited Peppé at his estate in Birdpur. With Peppé’s support, he convinced the government of India to gift the corporeal relics, or śarīradhātu, for presentation to his second cousin, the Siamese monarch King Chulalongkorn (Rama V), the sole remaining Buddhist sovereign. In the spirit of King Ashoka, the King of Siam had the relics subdivided. Since then, the relics discovered at Piprahwa have been enshrined at Wat Saket in Bangkok, the Shwedagon Pagoda in Yangon and sites across Sri Lanka. They have powered some of the most sacred Buddhist structures across Southeast and South Asia for more than a century.

Peppé was allowed to retain the “duplicate items” of the gem relics, comprising approximately one-fifth of the total find, which have remained within his family and been the focus of numerous exhibitions, including the 2023 “Tree & Serpent” show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The privilege we have of unveiling these contact relics in Hong Kong in our maison remains a challenge to my imagination.