Fine Art

PICASSO’S Blue Period canvas Femme aux bras croisés set a world record for the artist at auction on November 8.

FRANCE: A Paris court has granted a temporary injunction placing a Cézanne painting currently on show at a city museum under legal supervision pending an inquiry into its ownership.

The most startling result produced by the Allan Cuthbertson sale, Bonhams, London 3-4 October was an eight times estimate bid of £34,000 from Andrew Edmonds for a five volume set of The Caricature Magazine, or Mirror of Mirth.

LONDON: Highlight of the German and Austrian series from the Marvin & Janet Fishman Collection was Egon Schiele’s oil on canvas Portrait of the Art Dealer Guido Arnot, 4ft 7in x 3ft 7in (1.40 x 1.09m), signed and dated 1918 which sold at Sotheby’s in London for £6.5m (plus premium), more than twice its top estimate.

The market for 20th century German art proved dramatically selective last week when the much-promoted Marvin & Janet Fishman Collection came under the hammer at Sotheby’s on the evening of October 18.

UK: THE Thames-side meadows at Christopher Gibbs’ Manor House in Oxfordshire contained a number of pieces of classical statuary with important provenances, but none proved so valuable as this unheralded stone model of a recumbent cow.

USA: SKINNER’S auctioneers of Boston have set up a new contemporary art gallery which could do for American artists what Maurice Saatchi has done for Damien Hirst and others.

UK: THE Saatchi Gallery is to distribute 39 works of Contemporary Art by British artists among seven regional galleries and museums.

SOTHEBY’S have announced that they are to move the Impressionist, Modern and Contemporary Art sales they usually hold in December to February.

AUSTRALIA: BACK in the 1980s a local election campaign in a certain southern hemisphere country featured posters with the simple combination of a photo of the opposition candidate above the words GET THIS BASTARD.

FRANCE: REMBRANDT Bugatti, the sculptor brother from the famous racing car family, has been a major saleroom force for some years and there is no stopping him at the moment to judge by recent sales in Paris.

UK: PAUL Henry’s A Village in Connemara which sold for £58,000 at Edgar Horns in Eastbourne on July 12. The 16 x 24in (41 x 61cm) oil on canvas is fully signed and still bears an original paper label on the stretcher with title and artist, though the frame is a replacement.

THE second week of London’s prestige midsummer sales saw the Modern given way to the traditional with a flurry of exceptional prices for Old Master paintings and drawings and Renaissance works of art.

ITALIAN Renaissance sculpture made a rare splash in the national news last week with the announcement that a £3500 bronze bought in Los Angeles by leading London works of art dealer Daniel Katz was now identified as a “multimillion pound masterpiece by Donatello”.

THOUGH it might no longer be the place where an international vendor would choose to sell a £20m Picasso or Van Gogh, London last week enhanced its reputation as a revenue for selling major-name Impressionist, Modern and Contemporary art with a string of major results at Sotheby’s and Christie’s evening sales.

UK: AGNEW’S have strengthened their commitment to contemporary art with the appointment of Mark Adams as director in charge of the contemporary department.

UK: OVER half the images in the Craven collection of photographs offered by Bearne’s in Exeter on May 6 were by William, 2nd Earl of Craven.

US: A concerted push into the market by Phillips meant that there were three major players on the Impressionst and Modern auction scene in New York last week.

UK: THE first week of May saw a rash of specialist photograph, auctions break out in England but the cream of the crop was a single-owner sale of vintage photographs collected by William, 2nd Earl of Craven (1809-1866), at Bearne’s in Exeter on May 6.

UK: THIS bronze, Theseus Slaying the Minotaur, stamped Barye 1, made £105,000 at Sotheby’s on April 19.