North America

NICK Korniloff has exclusively told ATG that the Florida International Fine Art Fair scheduled for a February 2011 launch in Miami is officially postponed for a year.

ALONGSIDE the $65.5m (£42.8m) Modigliani (see story here), the price of the week in New York was the phenomenal $32m (£20.9m) seen for The Finding of Moses by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema.

RECORD prices for three European artists helped lift the latest round of Impressionist and Modern art sales in New York. With the market much more selective since the downturn two years ago and most of the competition focusing on the biggest trophy lots, the new saleroom highs for Henri Matisse, Juan Gris and Amedeo Modigliani provided further evidence of recovery at the top end.

FOR decades one of the world’s leading modern art dealerships, the Jan Krugier Gallery will close its New York headquarters at the end of this year and transfer all its operations to Geneva, Switzerland.

SOTHEBY’S have launched a retail and online wine business based in New York.

PHILLIPS de Pury will open a second auction and exhibition gallery in New York, at 450 Park Avenue.

MASSACHUSETTS has become the 14th state to ban the sale of novelty cigarette lighters.

DISGRACED New York art dealer Lawrence Salander has been jailed for a minimum of six years after pleading guilty to orchestrating one of the world’s biggest ever art frauds.

The man behind the Atlantique City Fair, once dubbed the largest indoor antiques and collectables fair in the world, is to launch a new event in Pennsylvania.

A DEBT-plagued university in Boston has entered into an agreement with Sotheby’s to lease rather than sell off works from its museum’s $350m art collection.

“ED seriously injured late today when train hit car – Ritch”. When a shocked John Steinbeck received this telegram in May, 1948, he left immediately for Monterey, California, but by the time he got there his good friend Ed Ricketts, the man he later described as being “part of my brain for 18 years”, was dead.

THE Art and Antique Dealers League of America are to launch a new antiques fair at the Park Avenue Armory on Manhattan’s Park Avenue from April 28 to May 2 next year.

THE troubled internet entrepreneur and art collector Halsey Minor, who in March was ordered to hand over $6.6m for unpaid items ‘bought’ at Sotheby’s, has won a parallel legal battle with Christie’s.

A SPECIAL addition to Christie’s mid-season Old Masters and 19th century art sale in New York on June 9 is what the auctioneers describe as “an exceptional selection of European paintings and sculpture” from the former Salander-O’Reilly Galleries in Manhattan.

SWISS-based animal philanthropist Jeanne Marchig is suing Christie's over the female portrait sold as '19th century German' at Christie's New York in 1998 for $19,500 but now called La Bella Principessa and claimed as a £100m work by Leonardo da Vinci.

IF major auctions in New York are anything to go by, then the amount of money being spent on blue-chip pieces of Modern and Contemporary art is now almost back to the level seen before the market crashed 18 months ago.

THE return of free-spending at the very top end of the art market continued apace at last week’s Impressionist and Modern sales series in New York as boom-time levels of bidding were seen on the blockbuster lots. For the second time this year, a new record was set for any artwork ever sold at auction.

AN American collector who sued Sotheby’s, alleging they concealed a financial interest in, and inflated the price of, a painting that he bought for almost $10m, has lost his case.

EBAY users in the US are questioning the merits of the feedback system after a buyer from Florida who left negative comments for a seller has been hit by a $15,000 lawsuit for defamation.

ANTIQUITIES and other cultural property claimed by Italy as part of its heritage may soon be barred from entering the United States unless accompanied by Italian export permits. This could have a significant effect on the trade and transport of classical coins, for which the US is one of the largest markets.