Europe

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.

Adams of Dublin were once again top of the Irish rooms posting a €19.4m (£14.6m) hammer turnover for 2007.

For the first time, a trio of auction firms pulled clear of the field in Paris in 2007.

There is nothing quite like dying young for genius to acquire immortality. An object lesson in this came with the predictably frantic bidding from the four corners of the world at the sale of some effects once belonging to Maria Callas. The total of €1.3m (£900,000) trebled expectations.

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.

FRENCH auctioneers are to hold their next open weekend of events on November 17-18.

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

THE French government are so concerned about their dwindling share of the global art market that they have come up with a four-point plan to rescue it. They include a measure that effectively calls for the scrapping of due diligence for auctioneers.

A delegation of 17 members of the Syndicat National des Maison de Ventes Voluntaires (SyMEV, the main body representing French auctioneers) was in England last week for a three-day study tour investigating different aspects of the UK market.

Antiquorum, the world’s leading watch auctioneers, insist it will be “business as usual” following the shock departure this August of the Geneva firm’s charismatic founder, Osvaldo Patrizzi, after a row with Japanese owners Artist House Holdings, who acquired Antiquorum for a reported $30m in 2006.

DUBLIN auctioneers James Adam have negotiated a €3.5m (£2.4m) sale of remarkable papers setting a record for a single transaction of documents relating to the 1916 Easter Rising.

Half-yearly Paris figures to August showed Christie’s consolidating their lead with sales of €100.3m (£67.3m), nearly twice as much as their nearest rivals, ArtCurial.

THIRTY-six stallholders from Portobello Road made their way to Madrid at the end of June where the London street market was recreated for a day in the Spanish capital.

France’s share of the global auction market fell by 5.8 per cent in 2006, warns the Conseil des Ventes, the national auction watchdog, in its annual report published on June 25. Worldwide auction activity, it says, rose 34 per cent over the same period.

Munich auctioneers Hermann Historica are known internationally as experts for arms and armour, medals and historical collectibles rather than tribal art, so they were on unfamiliar territory with lot 3324 in their latest blockbuster sale held from May 2 to 11.

Sotheby’s have opened an office in Moscow and appointed Mikhail Kamensky, a former director and presidential advisor to the Bank of Moscow, as managing director.

Bonhams have become the latest saleroom to open an office in Moscow, a further indication of the growing importance of Russian buyers in the international auction market.

Dublin fine art auctioneers James Adam’s are to join forces with premier bloodstock sales company, Goffs, to host Ireland’s first specialist sporting sale in October.

The Birmingham industrialist and designer Matthew Boulton was the toast of the Paris salerooms last week when this impressive ormolu-mounted fluorspar vase was sold at Drouot Richelieu for €170,000 (£121,430) plus premium.

Sotheby’s – who were outsold by Christie’s in Paris last year three to one – have announced a series of moves designed to reposition their Paris branch as “one of the pillars of the group’s global strategy”.