Auctioneers

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.

In these days of raging prices for anything remotely decorative in the world of antiques, it is not often that you find something early, unusual and pleasing to the eye for little more than £500.

UK: Phillips have announced the closure of two more of their provincial salerooms, Guildford and Ringwood, as part of their ongoing and extensive restructuring programme.

UK: The unexpected crowd puller at Lyon & Turnbull’s 509-lot sale on October 8 was this Wanli period (1573-1619) Chinese blue and white ewer estimated at £400-500

IT WILL simplify sales say Sotheby’s. Within the next month Sotheby’s will be merging their two online ventures, sothebys.com and sothebys.amazon.com under the sothebys.com banner.

LONDON: Renaissance period combined scaphe dial and astrolabe made by Arsenius of Louvain, dated 1563.

$45m fine for Sotheby’s but five years to pay: Diana ‘Dede’ Brooks, former president and chief executive of Sotheby’s, has pleaded guilty in a Manhattan Federal Court to price-fixing with Christie’s between 1993 and 1999.

UK: THE Court of Appeal has set a precedent under case law which forces auctioneers to sell to the highest bidder where a reserve has not been set, regardless of how low the winning bid is.

Sotheby’s board of directors have approved payment of $256m to clients in the civil lawsuit which claimed collusion with Christie’s in setting charges for buyers in 1992 and sellers in 1995.

UK: TOMMASO Zanzotto, chairman of Stocklight, which owns the Bernard J. Shapero Rare Books recently acquired Bloomsbury Book Auctions, has vowed to keep the two companies totally separate.

UK: The first celebrity house sale of the new millennium took place last week near Clifton Hampden in Oxfordshire, where noted aesthete and furnisher to the stars Christopher Gibbs was clearing his Victorian manor house under the auspices of Christie’s.

UK: WHATEVER the privations of life in the Soviet Union, one could still enjoy a simple game of chess. But because official art is turned to the use of propaganda in every dictatorship, so the more opulent chess sets in post-revolutionary Russia became a metaphor for the struggle between communists and capitalists.

UK: Loyal service brings its rewards, as this fine Queen Anne walnut bachelor’s chest, which sold at Anderson & Garland on Thursday, September 21, attests.

US: TANGIBLE Asset Galleries, the Californian art and antiques auctioneers and dealers, have pulled out of the deal to acquire Gavelnet.com, the Internet and interactive TV auction company.

UK: Eighteen months after their £52m sale of works of art from the Austrian branch of the Rothschild dynasty, Christie’s have secured a further collection, this time from the French arm of the famous banking family and estimated to fetch over £15m.

UK: English or Continental? That was the question specialist dealers and collectors were asking themselves of this mid-16th century brass candlestick which turned up at Sotheby’s oak sale at Billingshurst, Sussex on September 12 and 14

UK: Bonhams, the 200 year old family-owned British auction house and Brooks, the classic car and automobilia auctioneers, are to merge.

The combined hammer prices for pre-war B-movie advertising posters at auction houses these days can easily exceed the budgets allocated by the old Hollywood studios to such downmarket films.

ACADEMY Auctioneers, London, have vowed to fulfil their commitments to existing clients, despite disputes over the sale of the company.

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.