International

Having successfully dispersed the collection of Lalique glass formed by Hans and Gertrud Mueller in March this year, Sotheby’s Australia is now selling the couple’s collection of other European Art Glass.

Christie’s has added a top-end sale of 19th century art to its calendar of New York auctions in October.

Dating from 1944, the ink, watercolour and gouache artwork shown belowwas made by Russell H Tandy to illustrate the cover of The Secret in the Old Attic, the 21st of Carolyn Keene’s ‘Nancy Drew’ mysteries.

The mammoth disposal of the Aristophil collections of historic manuscripts began last week with a premium-inclusive €17.6m series of seven June auctions offered over four days at Drouot (June 15 and 18-20).

It took less than five minutes for a work by Max Beckmann (1884-1950) to become the most expensive painting ever sold at a German auction.

Billed as “the world’s most valuable illustrated book”, the ex-Duke of Portland set of Audubon’s Birds of America offered by Christie’s New York (25/20/12.5% buyer’s premium) on June 14 was sold for $8.3m (£6.24m), a price only once bettered at auction.

For many years now, German Enigma code machines have been making big, sums at auction, but in the Bonhams New York June 12 sale a slim codebook relating to their use also prompted a much, much higher than expected and six-figure bid.

More than 50 works by the French modern sculptor César (1921-98) are on display in the artist’s home city of Marseille.

Germany’s most expensive painting sold at auction, an unusual early firearm and a fin de siècle snake charmer are among the highlights featured here from recent auctions in Munich, Berlin and Cologne.

The earliest publication in any form of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar came with its inclusion as part of the 1623 First Folio, and in a recent US sale a bound set of the 22pp that it occupied in that great work prompted a six-figure bid.

Bound together, first editions of both parts of the 1679-83 edition of Maria Sybilla Merian’s study of caterpillars and their transformation into butterflies, Der Raupen…, sold to a Danish bidder for €42,000 (£32,060) in a sale held by Ketterer Kunst (23% buyer’s premium) of Hamburg.

The post-war industrial modernist designs of Jean Prouvé and Charlotte Perriand remain firm sellers. Pieces from their best-documented commissions, like the furnishings created in the 1950s for the student residences of the Cité Universitaire in Paris, are particularly strong.

In the immediate post-war era the work of the French designer-decorator Jean Royère (1902-81) took a turn to embrace a more organic or ‘biomorphic’ style.

The Federalist…, a collection of essays first published in New York newspapers in the years immediately following independence, is today recognised as a seminal work on American political theory and a cornerstone of constitutional governance.