International

FRANCE: Sotheby’s and Paris auctioneers Maîtres Hervé Poulain and Rémy Le Fur have announced today an association to conduct three important sales in Paris on June 27, 28-29 and July 5, 2001.

USA: IT involves a rather longer trip than to North Yorkshire, but among the world’s top events celebrating ethnographic arts and crafts The New York International Tribal Antiques Show will run at the Seventh Regiment Armory, Park Avenue and 67th St, from May 20 to 23 with a $75 evening benefit preview on Saturday May 19.

USA: Fears that the recent slowdown in the US economy would drastically affect the top end of the art market were to some extent realised at New York’s Impressionist and Modern sales last week.

Dennis Tito is evidently not the only American millionaire with a fascination for space exploration.

Work to transform and modernise the Hôtel Drouot has been delayed for a third time due to “technical and material constraints” and will now begin in March/April 2002 and last until September next year.

FRANCE: François Curiel, 52, is to replace Hugues Joffre as head of Christie’s France in an adminstrative shake-up that also sees the departure of Christie’s French Director-General Franck Prazan, who helped mastermind the firm’s transfer to their new premises on Avenue Matignon. Joffre and Prazan are both expected to leave the firm.

This month sees New York auctioneers Doyle (15/10 per cent buyer’s premium) offering two significant separately-catalogued single-owner collections within the space of a fortnight.

Every sector of the auction market has been feeling jittery about the prospect of economic slowdown in the US. Wine sales have already had to re-adjust to more sober trading conditions after the binge of sales that led up to Millennium and auctioneers on both sides of the Atlantic have been understandably nervous about rich clients thinking that $5000 cases of wine have become an unjustifiable luxury.

LONDON-based Haughton International Fairs have changed the name of their International 20th Century Arts Fair to The International Art + Design Fair 1900-2001.

ENOUGH of the 117 exhibitors reported decent sales at the 32nd Kunst Messe Koln, the West German Antique Dealers Association national fair at Cologne’s Trade Fair Centre from March 24 to April 1, to record a solid performance, probably up on last year.

Some payouts expected by June. Buyers and sellers at Sotheby’s and Christie’s will now be able to sue the auctioneers through the United States courts over transactions that took place in London and elsewhere outside the US.

USA: First there was The Antiques Roadshow, now we have the Antiques Rivershow. That is the aim of a New Orleans antiques dealer who wants to take to the Mississippi on a decomissioned casino boat with the most unusual antiques fair yet devised.

EIRE: WITH the traditional Irish sales due in London next month, many an eye was on the Dublin sale held by James Adams (15 per cent buyer’s premium) on March 28 to see how pictures were selling in their native land.

Golf in the USA PICTURED here is a remarkable wooden golf club that was the highlight of a specialist sporting and golf sale held in Miami last month.

FRANCE: The French provinces continue to be a rich source of high-level goods as proved by the sale of this 1760s table de milieu with exuberant ormolu mounts attributed to the Roman bronzier Luigi Valadier, plus a marble top set with semi-precious stones, to the Paris trade for Fr6.4m (£610,000, plus 10.865 per cent buyer’s premium), in the sleepy town of Narbonne, south-west France, on April 1.

US: A Japanese cloisonné enamel vase usurped an 18th century Chinese jade brushwasher – expected to be the star lot – to take pride of place in Sloan’s (15/10 per cent buyer’s premium) Asian Ceramics and Works of Art sale on April 2, Washington DC.

TWO men have been charged in the United States in a conspiracy to sell the 1814 Treaty of Fontainebleu, signed by Napoleon and stolen in 1988 from the French National Archives in Paris.

AUSTRIA: THERE were three prices of over ASch1m (£50,000) at the Wiener Kunst (20 per cent buyer’s premium) modern art sale on March 6, starting with Rudolf Wacker’s 1924 Puppentheater, 25 x 19in (64 x 47cm), a puppet theatre with rag doll, at ASch2.2m (£100,000). The back of the canvas featured another painting, of boats moored in a small marina.

A fine example of the memorial coinage to Julius Caesar struck by Octavian, this 30mm diameter example with a fine portrait made E1275 (£790).

Slightly worn, as they usually come, but with a good portrait, this testone of François I (1515-47 – 28mm diam) sold for E170 (£105).