Fine Art

Thin catalogues and thin demand for aggressively-priced works by Modern masters characterised the recent sales of Impressionist and Modern Art in New York.

CHRISTIE’S are to replace a wide range of specialist picture sales with a new sale category incorporating 600 years of traditional Western art. The change will be implemented worldwide from May across their salerooms in London, New York, Milan, Paris and Amsterdam.

LONDON Sculpture Week, which was scheduled for June 12 to 19, has been suspended due to lack of sponsorship.

More details have emerged regarding the ‘breach-of-contract’ lawsuit which claims that Christie’s backed out of a $40m guarantee made to secure a Francis Bacon self-portrait for sale.

Next month a Russian businessman and collector will open the world’s first museum dedicated to the Russian Imperial jeweller Fabergé.

ST James's gallery Dickinson had one of the most impressive selections of paintings at TEFAF Maastricht and, like many other dealers in Old and Modern Masters, enjoyed a good fair.

DAVID Smith of Neptune Fine Art, the dealer who was duped into buying a fake Lowry painting, has told ATG that potential buyers should be exceptionally careful when considering purchasing a Lowry painting.

DUTCH police have recovered eight paintings stolen from Robert Noortman’s gallery in Maastricht in 1987. The works, which included valuable works by Renoir and Pissarro, were traced to two small towns in the south of Holland after an alleged middleman in Dubai made an attempt to sell the paintings back to the insurers for a reported €5m (£4.5m).

TWENTY of London's top art dealers have joined forces with the auction houses to launch Master Paintings Week in London this summer.

BY 1780, John Trumbull (1756-1843), a budding young artist from Lebanon, Connecticut who had sketched the Revolutionary War, found himself in grave difficulty.

IT doesn’t happen very often that either Sotheby’s or Christie’s can claim a major sales victory over their rivals, but at the latest Old Masters series in New York one side came out the clear winners.

A major new conference for antiques and fine art auctioneers will take place at the Hilton Hotel, Birmingham, NEC on Friday, April 24.

STAYING topical but putting a comic slant on events, an exhibition of original artwork for cartoons relating to financial and political crises will be a feature of The Watercolour & Drawings Fair next February.

A retired Massachusetts lawyer found guilty of involvement in a major art theft that extends back three decades has been sentenced to seven years in a Federal prison.

A Borders property provided Thomson Roddick (15% buyer's premium) with a sensational discovery for their sale in Rosewell, Edinburgh on December 4.

A FAMILY feud has led to yet another cancellation of the sale of 63 works of art by Oskar Schlemmer, one of the central figures of the Bauhaus.

BY the time sale day came around, Holloways of Banbury knew they had something special on their hands.

Old Masters provided some solace for the London auction rooms last week, posting the solid totals and some eye-catching prices to suggest this most established of markets will ride the downturn better than its modern counterparts.

In a week that saw the London salerooms offering their traditional December round of Old Master pictures, continental furniture and works of art, one of the strongest prices proved to be the £1m (plus premium) paid for this lively and intriguing 3ft (90cm) high bacchic bronze at Sotheby's on December 2.

This monumental 19th century Russian gilt-bronze mounted porcelain vase, created by the Imperial Porcelain Factory in St Petersburg, is thought to have been included in the wedding dowry of a daughter of Tsar Nicholas I.