THE ARTS

Expensive Flowers: “Flowers on a Bench,” a luxuriant still-life painting by 19th-Century French realist Gustave Courbet, was sold Wednesday for $1.54 million. The sale surpassed the artist’s previous record price of $1.44 million, set in 1990. An unidentified Swiss art foundation bought the record-setting painting in a Christie’s New York auction from the estates of industrialists Palmer and Charles Ducommun.