International

SYDNEY auction house Menzies Arts Brands recorded the highest price ever paid for an Australian artwork when Sidney Nolan's First Class Marksman 1946 sold to an anonymous phone bidder for Aus$4.5m (£2.9m) at their latest sale.

DISGRACED New York dealer Lawrence Salander, erstwhile co-owner of Manhattan’s Salander-O’Reilly Gallery, has admitted to orchestrating a $120m art fraud.

A VERY Italian tale involving an important collection of papers that once belonged to the ‘father of art history’, Giorgio Vasari, took a new twist last month when a court injunction halted its sale by auction at the eleventh hour.

THE New York International Tribal and Textile Arts Show, normally held in May, has been cancelled this year.

IF the mood at the opening of the TEFAF Maastricht fair on March 11 was tempered with a note of caution, this was dramatically heightened after a power cut plunged the halls into complete darkness just as the vernissage was getting underway.

Five months after ATG revealed the reattribution of La Bella Principessa to Leonardo da Vinci, the man who spotted it is ready to unveil another major find.

SOTHEBY’S staged the most lucrative art sale ever in the Netherlands on March 8 when they offered a 161-lot selection of contemporary art from the corporate collection of British American Tobacco.

NEW rules this summer mean that every work of art transported to and from the United States by a commercial passenger airliner must be screened individually by US airport security.

TAKE a beautiful sitter, a leading portraitist, add a touch of glamour and offer with an appetising estimate. Such is the recipe for a riotous bidding feast.

ACTION Comics ushered in the age of superheroes when its first issue hit the news stands in June 1938. On its cover was a curious character dressed in skintight blue and red lifting a green Chevrolet above his head, and the course of American pop culture was changed forever.

MORE transparency and regulation at New York auctions is promised if a bill recently introduced in the state legislature is passed.

A DEALER who says his career has been ruined by trumped-up charges in the Greek courts has been arrested again – even though he is currently appealing against the conviction and three-year jail sentence.

EBAY’s legal fortunes continue to seesaw, with a Paris court ordering them to pay 230,000 euros to Louis Vuitton Malletier in costs and damages.

LAPADA are hoping to tap directly into the luxury goods market during a special trade mission to Moscow next month.

BEIJING-based auction house China Guardian has published record sales results for 2009.

FOLLOWING the severe winter weather that has struck the East Coast of the US, Freemans of Philadelphia chose to postpone for a week the sale of the Lehman Brothers Collection Part II.

Faced with the biggest crisis in its history, the Hôtel Drouot, the central Paris auction venue, has announced sweeping changes to how it is run.

John Ward, head of Sotheby’s New York silver department, said it was the piece of American silver that had it all: “Large size, great condition, beautiful design by an idiosyncratic maker, fresh provenance, and a great story.”

INTERNATIONAL Coin Exchange, a new firm of Dublin-based auctioneers, will hold their first sale on February 19.

MAJOR American museums played an active role as both buyers and sellers in the latest Old Master sales in New York.