Sotheby's

SOTHEBY’S have closed the gap between themselves and Christie’s on worldwide sales in 2007, announcing a record $6.2bn of consoldiated sales to Christie’s $6.3bn.

THE global contemporary art market received an important shot in the arm in London last week as Sotheby's set the highest total ever seen for a contemporary art sale in Europe.

Sotheby’s have announced the private treaty sale of a Guarneri del Gesu violin to the Russian businessman and collector, Maxim Viktorov.

Knock-on effect of turbulence in money markets is less dramatic than feared at art auctions

SOTHEBY’S and Christie’s have launched an unprecedented attack on France’s auction laws in a bid to halt Paris’s decades-long decline as a market force.

SOTHEBY’S have released interim headline sales figures for 2007, which show worldwide auction totals up 44 per cent on 2006 at $5.4bn.

Sotheby’s have agreed to sponsor Tate Britain’s Duveens Commission, thereby allowing this site-specific sculpture commission to become an annual rather than a biennial event.

This massive silver-gilt shield of Achilles, by Rundell, Bridge & Rundell of London, lost to scholars for the better part of the 20th century, appeared at Sotheby's on December 18 after resurfacing in Belgium.

It is only 3.25in (8cm) high, but it made more than any sculpture or antiquity ever offered at auction.

Gagosian’s bid gives Sotheby’s new heart

Aggressive estimates rather than a fallout from credit-market losses were responsible for the first ‘wobble’ in the international art market, say Sotheby’s.

Anyone who picked up Sotheby’s latest Chinese catalogue for their November 7 sale in London could not have failed to notice the stunning blue and white Qianlong moonflask on the catalogue cover, the piece that topped the sale when it sold for £2.5m.

When the last of the 823 lots in the sale of the contents Ariane Dandois’ Gallery on the Faubourg St Honoré in Paris was hammered down by Sotheby’s on October 26, it provided a $32.2m (£16.9m) grand finale to a month of sales devoted to traditional areas of the decorative arts in New York.

Sotheby’s have posted their highest price in Paris since the French auction market was opened to foreign firms in 2001.

What price one of the most important legal documents in the history of democracy? On December 10, Sotheby’s New York will offer for sale one of just 17 surviving 13th century copies of Magna Carta.

There will be a new slant to this month’s Islamic week of sales in London. In a move presumably aimed to tap into new areas of the lucrative Middle Eastern market, Sotheby’s will inaugurate a sale of Modern and contemporary Arab Iranian Art. The sale will take place on the afternoon of Wednesday, October 24, immediately after their traditional Islamic works of art sale.

The auction of the Rostropovich-Vishnevskaya collection of Russian art was dramatically cancelled the day before the sale following an offer from a Russian businessman for the entire collection.

Following the announcement in August of a newly-discovered 1938 fairground scene by Laurence Stephen Lowry (1887-1976) scheduled to appear at Sotheby’s on December 13, it has emerged that the scene depicted is not, in fact, Beswick Fair, near Manchester, as had been mooted.

Some of the heat may have left the Jack Vettriano (b.1951) market since his Singing Butler made £660,000 in April 2004, but Sotheby’s nevertheless posted the second highest price ever paid for the artist at auction when they sold Bluebird at Bonneville for £400,000 (plus premium) – the top lot of the firm’s annual sale at the Gleneagles Hotel in Perthshire on the evening of August 29.

Sotheby’s match Christie’s with 25% premium on lots sold below £10,000