International

SPECULATION is rising that many more restituted works of art may end up being offered for sale following a ruling made by Vienna’s city council.

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

LAWRENCE B. Salander, the former owner of the bankrupt Manhattan art gallery Salander-O’Reilly, has been charged in a 100-count indictment with stealing $88m. He faces up to 25 years in prison.

AN impressive example of Renaissance revivalism seen at Boston-based auction house Skinner on March 17 combined blue chip-names in both provenance and maker.

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).

THE French auctioneers' association SYMEV have launched their annual weekend Follement Marteau to promote buying at auction on March 28-29.

As befitting a sale with world-famous brand associations, Christie’s dispersal of the Yves Saint Laurent–Pierre Bergé collection in Paris was more like a rock concert or fashion show than an auction.

Leonard Joel auctioneers of Melbourne, Australia, are appealing to vendors to consign art, antiques and jewellery to auction and donate the proceeds to the Victorian Disaster Appeal to help victims of the Victorian bushfires.

SOTHEBY'S have completed the purchase of their New York headquarters in a $370m deal.

IN Paris the auction year will start in the most spectacular manner with the Yves Saint Laurent/Bergé collection sale on February 23-24. But 2009 holds out promise for the French art market in other areas too.

THE global credit crunch's latest victims are the Moscow World Fine Art Fair and the Salzburg World Fine Art Fair, which will not go ahead this year.

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.

THE appeal of Paris as an auction centre for jewellery received a boost at the start of the year, when France slashed import VAT on “rare” or “high value” jewellery from 19.6 per cent to 5.5 per cent.

The Irish Government have decided to go the same way as the UK in not applying the Artist’s Resale Right (ARR) to the heirs of dead artists until 2012. The extension means that ARR will continue to apply to works by living artists only.

SALES in 2008 in Paris saw Sotheby’s and Christie’s occupy the top two spots for the first time – and open up a significant gap on the rest of the field.

A former long-term employee of New England auctioneers Skinner has been indicted by a grand jury for allegedly stealing over $724,000 worth of cash and auctioned property.

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.

LONDON-based organisers Brian and Anna Haughton have cancelled the International Asian Art Fair scheduled for March 11 to 15 at New York's Park Avenue Armory – the first major fairs casualty of the world economic turmoil.

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.