Art market

Head of a bear sets new record for a drawing by Leonardo da Vinci, selling on a single bid for £8.8m at Christie's

The tiny "Post It note" drawing was sold by Thomas Kaplan, owner of the Leiden collection of Rembrandts, who bought it in 2008 based on a fax

Legal battle over €15m Leonardo discovery: owner, Tajan auction house and French government fight it out

An export ban was placed on the drawing in 2017 but the French culture ministry has not purchased the drawing as planned

Relaxed summer vibes at Arco Madrid despite opening with a third fewer exhibitors and no Latin American galleries

The Spanish art fair, which usually takes place in February, has braved the Madrid heat with this year’s postponed edition

Sotheby's will sell Christo's preparatory works for Arc de Triomphe wrap

Proceeds from exhibition will go towards funding the monumental Paris project

Is performance art finally collectible? New London gallery event aims to move medium into mainstream market

Performance Exchange will show work this weekend by artists including Helen Cammock, Abbas Zahedi and Tim Etchells in collaboration with ten commercial spaces

Noah Horowitz is stepping down as Art Basel’s director of Americas—next month

The Art Basel in Miami Beach chief will leave at the end of August, less than four months before the fair is due to take place in early December

'An opportunity for bargain hunters' or a waste of time? Italy relaxes stringent export laws for Old Masters and antiques worth less than €13,500

Lower-value older works and those by artists who died less than 50 years ago no longer need an export licence to leave the country—but the process can still be slow

German socialite Angela Gulbenkian pleads guilty to theft in London court

The charges against her stemmed from the fraudulent sale of a £1.1m Yayoi Kusama pumpkin sculpture to a Hong Kong collector, while a similar claim against her over a Warhol portrait remains in German court

England may be through to the Euro finals, but Sotheby's Old Master paintings sale scores an own goal

The auction house's £17.2m offering in London tonight was only 57% sold, overshadowed by the football match

'Livestreamed or IRL, gallery weekends or satellite spaces—the art market faces a paradox of choice'

Thanks to the pandemic, we have many alternative ways to buy, sell and enjoy art, and now this genie is out of the bottle, we don’t want to put it back

Art marketpreview

London Art Week finds the revolutionary in ancient relics with hybrid selling event

Collaborative shows from 2 to 16 July features over 40 galleries, with Florence’s Palazzo Strozzi chief curating an online exhibition for those who cannot make the trip

Three women, two cities, and a sea of Asian bidders—Christie's London to Paris sale delivers 'strongest summer season' since 2017

All but one of the four auctioneers conducting the £153.6m marathon 20th- and 21st-century evening sale were women

Why the figures bandied about in the art market are subject to caution

Estimates of the potential size of the art market are way off the mark

Campeche, a new gallery in Mexico City, champions underrepresented artists in a country dominated by 'machismo'

"We are trying to build a programme that will be very female and queer oriented... that might be difficult for a Mexican audience, but it has to happen,” founder says

Lucian Freud's portrait of David Hockney fetches £14.9m in strong hybrid sales at Sotheby’s in London

Asian bidders and British art boosted figures to make auction house's highest summer total since 2018

Design Miami to launch Podium pop-up exhibition in Shanghai this November

Rather than a full fledged fair, the event will bring together works from galleries and independent design studios

Forgotten Fragonard painting, deemed 'worthless' by its owners, fetches £6.6m at auction

Philosopher Reading is now the third most expensive work by the Rococo artist to sell at auction

Londonnews

What to see during Mayfair Art Week in London

From portraits of Napoleon and his wife reunited after nearly 200 years to Rafael Nadal's buttocks

Art marketanalysis

JingArt fair returns to Beijing—with a new crop of young collectors

The fair was cancelled last year due to Covid-19 but this year was bigger than ever before, at 43 galleries

Abstract art, mid-century furniture and contemporary design all under one roof at new London gallery

LAMB opens this week in the Georgian townhouse formerly occupied by Bernard Shapero rare books

Damien Hirst secures £15m in government Covid-19 loans despite owing more than £100m to his parent company in Jersey

The companies that make Hirst’s art and manage his £183m collection are owned by the offshore parent Science

Canadanews

Works by women artists reach new heights in Canadian auction

Two canvases by Carr blew past their estimate to become among the highest auction prices paid for her work, while a painting by 92-year-old Rita Letendre set a record for the artist

Blast off! Painting by David Bowie sells for more than $87,000 in online auction

The painting was found in an Ontario thrift shop and purchased for just five Canadian dollars

Sotheby's doubles down on private sales with Monte-Carlo gallery

Seasonal two-storey space is newest addition to Monaco's growing commercial art scene

Records set for Cinga Samson, Avery Singer, Vija Celmins, Titus Kaphar and Julie Curtiss at Phillips's $118.2m evening sale

Auction house chose to hold its 20th century and contemporary art evening sale in New York during what is traditionally the London season due to "detonated" calendar

Chinese gold sculpture breaks German auction record at €14m—almost triple the previous high

A Chinese collector bought the 15th century gold and bronze Ming-dynasty sculpture of the god Vajrabhairava earlier today

Hoard of plundered ancient art—discovered by police in a Belgian dealer's home—is returned to Italy

The almost 800 rare archaeological artefacts are now on show at the Castello Svevo in Bari

Los Angeles gallery Regen Projects brings on two new directors Bryan Barcena and Stephanie Dudzinski

Both Bryan Barcena and Stephanie Dudzinski have worked with major museums and galleries in the city

Back to the beginning: author and art critic Frederic Tuten will have his first solo show in the Hamptons

Tuten was close friends with Roy Lichtenstein, who twenty years ago saw promise in the writer’s sketchbook.