On June 17, 2014, Sotheby’s auctioned the British Guiana One-Cent Magenta, an 1856 penny issue discovered in 1873 by a schoolboy in Demerara (in what is now Guyana). After the June print edition of this magazine was on press, the editors learned that the 1856 one-cent stamp sold for $9.5 million, breaking the record for the most valuable object by weight and size and the most expensive stamp ever sold at auction. On that special day, Kayla Louise Dalle Molle, AB ’09, an associate cataloguer in the Special Projects department at Sotheby’s, was right in the thick of the action.
In 2012, Dalle Molle joined Sotheby’s as a floater, rotating through different departments. After four months, she was hired as the assistant in Trusts and Estates. Last summer, she joined the Special Projects team, working on the sale of unique, high-value items, such as the British Guiana stamp and the rare Bay Psalm Book, the first book printed in what is now the United States of America. It sold last fall at auction for $14.2 million.
“I’m able to work with objects that haven’t been seen in decades,” says Dalle Molle, who grew up in Milan. After graduating, she studied French at the Sorbonne and painting at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris before working at Perimeter Art & Design in Paris and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice.
Breaking into the competitive auction world isn’t for the fainthearted, but students can take steps to prepare themselves academically, says Elizabeth Childs, PhD, the Etta and Mark Steinberg Professor of Art History and chair, Department of Art History in Arts & Sciences.
Gaining competence in foreign languages is vital for an art-market career, Childs says. “It’s absolutely necessary in this global world. You have to be comfortable with the cultures of objects and collectors,” she says.
Getting the right internship at galleries and museums matters as well. Two of the best places for Wash. U. students are in their own neighborhood: the Saint Louis Art Museum and the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum.
Dalle Molle, an art history major, interned in Kemper’s Teaching in the Galleries program. In 2008, she interned at Sotheby’s in the Contemporary Art department.
Rachel Schorr, AB ’13, who double-majored in art history and psychology, worked at the Kemper Museum for three years. She also interned at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and was a curatorial intern at the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts in St. Louis.
The ink was barely dry on Schorr’s diploma when she joined Sotheby’s as a floater in July 2013. After only three weeks, she got hired on full-time as the day-sale administrator in the Impressionist and Modern Art department. “It’s all about timing and luck,” Schorr says.
Schorr didn’t just fall into her job, though. “I was extremely persistent when it came to keeping in touch with the HR department post-graduation,” she says. “If this is something you really want to do, you have to put your mind to it. Once you’re in the art world, opportunities really come at you very quickly. So keep your eyes open, go with the flow and always say ‘yes.’”