US

S.J. Shrubsole, the well-known silver dealership of New York, have pleaded guilty to failing to collect around $75,000 in city and state sales taxes on over $900,000 worth of goods. The gallery also pleaded guilty to falsifying tax returns filed with the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance. They have now paid $150,000 in fines relating to the plea.

NEW York’s top fair, Brian and Anna Haughton’s International Fine Art and Antique Dealers Show, is full with some 70 exhibitors and it is noticeable how many of the top dealers have gone for larger stands.

20TH CENTURY Decorative Arts in New York: American museums are not so squeamish about deaccessioning as British ones and Christie’s New York (19.5/12% buyer’s premium) headlined its 20th Century Decorative Arts sale on June 12 with 52 lots of Tiffany from the Museum of Modern Art.

Quimper collectors will no doubt recognise this plate as quite a rarity. Manufactured by Henriot, c.1917, the design depicts Uncle Sam offering his support to the French people within a Stars and Stripes border.

More than half of the world’s leading collectors are now based in the USA, according to a survey conducted by the New York-based magazine ARTnews. The 13th annual review of the world’s most active collectors of art and antiques – assembled through interviews with dealers, auctioneers, collectors, museum directors, curators, and consultants – found that 105 of the top 200 collectors are American with eight of the top ten spenders from the world’s superpower.

WITH more than 1000 dealers spread over 101/2 acres few would argue with the claim of Atlantique City to be the world’s largest indoor antiques and collectables show.

NEW York’s Posteritati Movie Posters, among the world’s leading specialists in the field, hold an exhibition of vintage posters from the MGM musicals of the 1930s to 1950s at their Manhattan gallery throughout July.

EVEN if it means shipping their stock across the Atlantic, there are more and more of the British trade who are determined that the Americans reluctance to travel over here is not going to stop us selling to them over there.

Casting aside one of the last vestiges of the old Phillips, the former New York headquarters of the auction house has been sold. The saleroom located at 406 East 79th Street on Manhattan's East Side was acquired during Phillips’ expansion in the United States in the 1990s and was retained by the company when LVMH bought into Phillips in 1999 and when Simon de Pury and Daniella Luxembourg took majority control in 2002.

US: DATES of October 14 to 20 have been fixed for the second annual New York Fall Fair at the Jacob K. Javits Center in New York, and the opening night preview party will benefit the Frick Collection, one of Manhattan’s most celebrated museums.

LAPADA has issued some valuable guidelines to the recipients of cheques relating to the Sotheby’s and Christie’s price-fixing settlement in the USA. As the cheques began to arrive by post last week many were surprised to see that the US Federal Government had deducted a withholding tax from the awards.

The ARTS & CRAFTS section of the most recent of the 20th Century Art & Design sales to be held in Cincinnati by Treadway & Toomey Galleries partnership on May 3 kicked off with a Gustave Stickley dining table at $12,000 (£7360), and Stickley pieces of all shapes and sizes popped up regularly thereafter.

A man who had a 17th century Dutch panel painting stolen from his home more than 20 years ago has failed in an Appeal Court to win compensation from Christie’s, who offered the picture for sale in 1997. Key to the test case was Christie’s ability to show they had acted in good faith, adding further legal weight to the importance of due diligence.

Vectis, the largest toy auctioneer in the world, with a turnover of £5m, is to open in America. Bryan Goodall, who has owned the Teesside company for seven years, has recently acquired The Diecast Toy Exchange, an auction house based in York, Pennsylvania.

IT will be some months before many deals are clinched and further money changes hands, but with some exceptions I think the 61 top dealers at the tenth International Fine Art Fair in New York from May 9 to 14 found their stay in Manhattan profitable.

WHILE in New York for the International Fine Art Fair, I dropped into Mallett’s new shop at 929 Madison Avenue. It could not have a better location and it is glamorous enough to have already made its mark in this select corner of Manhattan.

AN ARRAY of elegant objects sold mostly within estimates at the Celebration of the English Country House auction at Sotheby’s New York (20/12% buyer’s premium) on April 30 and May 1.

It hardly qualifies as a book, but the data card book in which Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin recorded critical values for input into the lunar module computer during the Apollo XI mission of 1969, autograph data that enabled them to make the first moon landing, certainly qualifies as an historical technical document.

BEARING the simple, one-word title ‘Literature’, an April 8 sale held by Christie’s New York (19.5/10% buyer's premium) was mostly concerned with books of the 19th and 20th centuries. Earlier works were rather thin on the ground and the principle lot in this category, a 1632 second folio Shakespeare, with the ‘To the Reader’ leaf in facsimile and with some outer leaves washed and pressed before it was bound in crimson morocco gilt by Rivière, was left unsold on an estimate of $90,000-120,000.

THERE was a collective sigh of relief in the New York salerooms last week when, after a long period of uncertainty following the war in Iraq and turmoil in the stockmarkets, both Sotheby’s and Christie’s held impressive Part I Impressionist and Modern sales. Any fears that anti-French feeling would spill over in the salerooms proved unfounded after French artists took the top honours at both houses.