International

NEW York art gallery Berry-Hill have had a number of artworks seized after a judge ruled it had defaulted on a $9.5m loan.

GIORGIO Corbelli, president of Italian auction house Finarte, has been given a 20-month jail sentence on charges related to financial dishonesty.

HERITAGE Auction Galleries will open a new gallery in New York in September. They have leased a ground-floor space, located at 445 Park Avenue, between 56th and 57th Streets.

LAPADA chief executive Sarah Percy-Davies has made significant inroads into the Russian domestic market on behalf of British dealers as part of an official British trade delegation.

SPEAKING to ATG at the end of last week, London Old Master dealer Johnny Van Haeften still had not actually seen the monumental painting by Frans Francken II (1581-1642) for which he paid 6.1m euros (£5.65m) at Dorotheum’s Old Master sale in Vienna on April 21.

TIFFANY have lost on most counts in their appeal against a ruling in a US federal district court backing eBay over the sale of the firm’s jewellery.

A LONG-lost array of paintings, prints, books and drawings owned by legendary art dealer Ambroise Vollard (1866-1939) will be one of the talking points of the Paris summer season when it goes on sale at Sotheby’s on June 29.

A MANUSCRIPTS dealer from Cheltenham has uncovered a major theft of letters from an American university. The case is now being investigated by the FBI.

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.