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The market for 20th century German art proved dramatically selective last week when the much-promoted Marvin & Janet Fishman Collection came under the hammer at Sotheby’s on the evening of October 18.

In these days of raging prices for anything remotely decorative in the world of antiques, it is not often that you find something early, unusual and pleasing to the eye for little more than £500.

THE Art-Law Centre of Switzerland is holding an international symposium, entitled Claims for the Restitution of Looted Art, at the Museum of Art and History in Geneva on November 10.

UK: Scholars probably know less about the makers of 18th century caddies and knife boxes than the little they have gleaned thus far regarding the makers of Georgian furniture.

UK: ART & Antiques on the Internet is the title of a one-day conference being staged at the Royal Institution on Thursday October 26 by the Institute of Art and Law and the RICS

UK: The unexpected crowd puller at Lyon & Turnbull’s 509-lot sale on October 8 was this Wanli period (1573-1619) Chinese blue and white ewer estimated at £400-500

IT WILL simplify sales say Sotheby’s. Within the next month Sotheby’s will be merging their two online ventures, sothebys.com and sothebys.amazon.com under the sothebys.com banner.

$45m fine for Sotheby’s but five years to pay: Diana ‘Dede’ Brooks, former president and chief executive of Sotheby’s, has pleaded guilty in a Manhattan Federal Court to price-fixing with Christie’s between 1993 and 1999.

FRANCE: RARELY can so many leading lights in the international art and antiques business have been gathered in the same room as happened at the luxurious George V hotel in Paris on Tuesday, October 3.

UK: THE Court of Appeal has set a precedent under case law which forces auctioneers to sell to the highest bidder where a reserve has not been set, regardless of how low the winning bid is.

LONDON: Renaissance period combined scaphe dial and astrolabe made by Arsenius of Louvain, dated 1563.

UK: THE Thames-side meadows at Christopher Gibbs’ Manor House in Oxfordshire contained a number of pieces of classical statuary with important provenances, but none proved so valuable as this unheralded stone model of a recumbent cow.

Sotheby’s board of directors have approved payment of $256m to clients in the civil lawsuit which claimed collusion with Christie’s in setting charges for buyers in 1992 and sellers in 1995.

UK: The first celebrity house sale of the new millennium took place last week near Clifton Hampden in Oxfordshire, where noted aesthete and furnisher to the stars Christopher Gibbs was clearing his Victorian manor house under the auspices of Christie’s.

UK: DEVON dealers J. Collins & Son are well known for their stock of functional period furniture, but looking through their new catalogue of recent acquisitions most would be hard pressed to spot the exact function of the extraordinary piece pictured here.

UK: WHATEVER the privations of life in the Soviet Union, one could still enjoy a simple game of chess. But because official art is turned to the use of propaganda in every dictatorship, so the more opulent chess sets in post-revolutionary Russia became a metaphor for the struggle between communists and capitalists.

US: TANGIBLE Asset Galleries, the Californian art and antiques auctioneers and dealers, have pulled out of the deal to acquire Gavelnet.com, the Internet and interactive TV auction company.

UK: Eighteen months after their £52m sale of works of art from the Austrian branch of the Rothschild dynasty, Christie’s have secured a further collection, this time from the French arm of the famous banking family and estimated to fetch over £15m.

UK: Loyal service brings its rewards, as this fine Queen Anne walnut bachelor’s chest, which sold at Anderson & Garland on Thursday, September 21, attests.

ACADEMY Auctioneers, London, have vowed to fulfil their commitments to existing clients, despite disputes over the sale of the company.