London

LONDON: SOTHEBY’S have signed a five-year lease to open a new 54,000 sq ft year-round saleroom at Olympia in west London from June next year. The first sale is expected to take place in September.

A protracted telephone duel saw this striking early 17th century, Roman inlaid marble and hardstone table top go from a starting bid of £500,000 to a final price of £1,030,000 to top Sotheby’s Continental Furniture sale in London on December 13.

UK: AGNEW’S are set to open a new gallery for Contemporary art in Old Bond Street in January.

Imagine being serenaded at your dinner table, preferably by one of the Python team, with the world’s smallest playable violin.

A HOUSE of Lords ruling in a copyright case tightening the rules on what constitutes an infringement could have a significant impact on the Contemporary art scene.

DETAILS of the planned development of Sotheby’s UK salerooms announced in last week’s Antiques Trade Gazette are unlikely to become clear before mid-December at the earliest.

This Regency giltwood chair may have been one of the largest hearing aids ever built, but it was intended to serve the same purpose as the smallest, mobile device: disguising the disablity and sparing the dignity of the listener.

Sold at Sotheby’s, London sale (October 12-13) for £6500 was a rare example of a printed version of one of the letters exchanged by Napoleon and the Sherif of Mekkah, Ghalib ibn Musa’id, at the time of the French invasion of Egypt in 1798-99.

UK: Doubt still hangs over the future of goods consigned to troubled west London auctioneers Academy of Ealing.

CLARION Events, organisers of the Olympia Fine Art and Antiques Fairs, assured the Antiques Trade Gazette last week that exhibitors at the June Olympia need not fear that the summer fair would be vastly enlarged in 2002.

As demonstration that one should always be alert outside one’s narrow field, it is worth citing the Civil War piece, pictured, that was offered in a Jewellery sale at Phillips London on October 3.

The most startling result produced by the Allan Cuthbertson sale, Bonhams, London 3-4 October was an eight times estimate bid of £34,000 from Andrew Edmonds for a five volume set of The Caricature Magazine, or Mirror of Mirth.

UK: ANDREW Morris, chief executive of Earls Court/Olympia in London and head of the company’s exhibitions organising arm, Clarion Events, has revealed that a thorough review of his art and antiques division will be unveiled in February.

LONDON: Highlight of the German and Austrian series from the Marvin & Janet Fishman Collection was Egon Schiele’s oil on canvas Portrait of the Art Dealer Guido Arnot, 4ft 7in x 3ft 7in (1.40 x 1.09m), signed and dated 1918 which sold at Sotheby’s in London for £6.5m (plus premium), more than twice its top estimate.

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.

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

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

UK: TOMMASO Zanzotto, chairman of Stocklight, which owns the Bernard J. Shapero Rare Books recently acquired Bloomsbury Book Auctions, has vowed to keep the two companies totally separate.

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.

UK: EARLS Court and Olympia Group chief executive Andrew Morris, one of the Morris family who bought the exhibition complex from P&O, is the new managing director of Clarion Events, the group’s event organising company.