ART

Getty Sells Masterpieces: The J. Paul Getty Museum has sold 14 paintings worth a total of $18.9 million at five sales in London in the past two weeks, auctioneers said. The Getty works sold by Sotheby’s were a mixed lot by impressionist and 19th-Century artists. Only one failed to sell: a dreary brown landscape by Edgar Degas. The top price was $6.8 million paid by the Japanese conglomerate Aksa International for Paul Gauguin’s 1889 painting of a Breton boy in a landscape. Other notable sales included $3 million for a picture of the cliffs at Pourville in Normandy by Claude Monet, $3.6 million for a picture of three ballet dancers by Degas and $3.4 million for a standing female nude by Pierre Bonnard. The museum has sold paintings before and said it would use the proceeds from the latest sales to acquire other works better suited to its collection and to public display.