North America

A London dealer has welcomed a new wide-ranging bill aimed at amending the law passed in the US last year banning the commercial trade in elephant ivory.

A study for one of Frederic, Lord Leighton’s (1830-1896) greatest paintings sold to an American private collector for £135,000 at Sotheby’s sale of Victorian, Pre-Raphaelite and British Impressionist Art.

A stolen Auguste Rodin sculpture, recovered after it was consigned to Christie’s in 2011, will go to auction later this year.

The US Court of Appeals has ruled that the California Resale Royalty Act (CRRA) can stand but apply only to sales made within the state and not to those made out-of-state by California residents.

The third annual ‘Art Crime and Cultural Heritage Symposium’ will be held in New York on June 4-6.

The latest Modern and Contemporary art auctions in New York took the market to new heights with $2.73bn (£1.84bn) changing hands over two weeks of flagship sales.

Christie’s evening sale of post-war and Contemporary art last night posted a premium-inclusive total of $658.5m (£445m) as the bumper fortnight of auctions continued in New York.

Mark Rothko’s 'Untitled (Yellow and Blue)' led Sotheby’s sale of Contemporary art in New York last night.

A new high for any work of art sold at auction came at Christie’s New York last night as Pablo Picasso’s ‘Les femmes d’Alger (Version ‘O’)’ sold at $160m (£108.1m).

Antique dealers, collectors, auctioneers and museum representatives gathered in Connecticut last month to oppose a bill seeking a total and uncompromising ban on the sale of ivory.

Like many an antiques dealer, Mark Griffin of Arbatel Antiques lives something of a double life.

It has the highest-ever estimate placed on a work of art at auction. Predicted to fetch ‘in the region of $140m’, Christie’s are offering Pablo Picasso’s ‘Les femmes d’Alger (Version ‘O’)’ in New York on May 11.

The April staging of the ‘Philadelphia Antiques Show’, one of America’s premier antiques events, has been cancelled. The fair, faced with falling dealer and visitor numbers in recent years, hopes to return in 2016 at a new venue with a broader exhibitor base.

Stable year-on-year values across art and antique exports as a whole mask major changes in influence among the UK’s trading partners in 2014.

Christie’s evening sale post-war & Contemporary art in London posted a decent performance with some of the biggest names in the market headlining the auction.

The Black Beauty, the prototype for all Gibson Les Paul guitars, will appear at Guernsey Auctions’ February 19 sale in New York.

The owner of leading south Florida auction house Elite Decorative Arts has pleaded guilty to wildlife trafficking and agreed to a fine of $1.5m.

This version of John Constable’s (1776-1837) celebrated painting ‘Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows’ sold for $4.5m (£3.1m) at Sotheby’s Old Master sale in New York yesterday. It was an oil sketch with quite a backstory.

Sotheby's have announced a new buyer’s premium structure in New York. Effective from February 1, the rates will apply as follows:

The heavy volume of snow on the East Coast of America has led to the cancelling and rescheduling of auctions.