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Francis Bacon's Study of Figure in a Mirror Sells For $39.7 Million at Sotheby's    LONDON - Sotheby's Evening Sale of Contemporary Art tonight achieved ?95,030,000 ($189,424,299), the highest total ever for any sale of Contemporary Art held in Europe, against a pre-sale estimate of ?72,025,000-?102,855,000. Records were set for six artists.  

Two Impressive Works From Watts Gallery Lead Christie's Victorian And Traditionalist Sale LONDON - Christie's announce that they will offer two impressive works at the auction of Victorian and Traditionalist Art on 5 June 2008 in London; Jasmine by Albert Joseph Moore (estimate: ?600,000-800,000) and The Triumph of Love, a painting on 4 canvases framed as one by Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones (estimate: ?400,000-600,000). Both works are offered from the non-core collection of Watts Gallery, Surrey, in order to raise money for the collection endowment fund at the Gallery to safeguard the future of its core collection.

Russian Art Show In London Sets Bad Precedent     LONDON'S Royal Academy of Arts is drawing excited crowds with its exhibition "From Russia: French and Russian Master Paintings 1870-1925 From Moscow and St. Petersburg." These 120 Impressionist and Modernist masterpieces couldn't be shown, however, until Britain acceded to a very unusual condition: that Parliament enact special legislation providing complete immunity to Russia from anyone claiming ownership of these paintings, some of which were seized by the Communists during the Bolshevik Revolution.

A Thoroughly Modern Monet Bridges The Old and The New at Christie's New York    NEW YORK - Christie's International is delighted to announce the sale of Claude Monet's Le Pont du chemin de fer ? Argenteuil, one of the greatest Impressionist pictures left in private hands. Painted in 1873, Le Pont du chemin de fer ? Argenteuil is a rare and luminous masterpiece of high Impressionist style and a hugely significant work in Monet's oeuvre. The work will be sold during Christie's New York Impressionist and Modern Art Evening sale on May 6. The picture may break the world auction record for the most well-known and sought-after Impressionist painter

Sotheby's Spring Sale of Indian Art, To Be Held in New York on March 19   NEW YORK - Sotheby's spring sale of Indian Art in New York will be held on March 19, 2008, and will include important Modern paintings by M.F. Husain, J. Swaminathan, Rameshwar Broota, F. N. Souza, S. H. Raza, Ganesha Pyne and Arpita Singh, among others. The offering of 89 lots, which is estimated to bring $4.8/6.8 million, will be on public exhibition beginning March 13th.

Sotheby's To Hold Second London Sale of Rusian Contemporary Art   LONDON - Following Sotheby's hugely successful pioneering London sale of Russian Contemporary Art in February, 2007 - the Company's best-ever year for sales of Russian Art - on Wednesday, March 12, 2008 Sotheby's will hold its second ever sale in this category in London.

Impressionist and Modern Art Mid-Season Sale at Christie's   NEW YORK - The Impressionist and Modern Art mid-season sale at Christie's Rockefeller realised $3,686,500 and was 97% sold by value, 91% by lot. The final total soared way about the highest pre-sale expectations, which stood at $2.43 million.

Missing Basquiat art reappears in NYC    NEW YORK - An $8 million painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat has been located in a Manhattan warehouse after apparently being smuggled out of Brazil, federal prosecutors said. Prosecutors filed papers Wednesday seeking to seize the 1982 painting, called "Hannibal," in an effort to help Brazilian authorities claim it.

Should Museums Really Be Returning Art?  ON THE FIRST floor of Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, in the early Greek art galleries, there is a long display case filled with Athenian ceramics. In one corner, partway up the linen backing, are two holes, a couple of inches apart, where a shelf holding a small, 2,500-year-old oil flask was once attached. Upstairs, in the Imperial Roman galleries, a group of marble busts and statues has been rearranged after the departure of a 6-foot-tall marble statue of the Roman empress Sabina. Ten Greek pots and one carved marble fragment from Imperial Rome are also gone from the museum's collection.

No signs of a City cash crisis as Francis Bacon brings home £26m record "When I die, my paintings won't be worth anything, I'll be forgotten," Francis Bacon once told a friend. How wrong the artist, who died in 1992, was. One of his canvases was sold last night for £26.34 million, breaking the record for any postwar and contemporary work of art sold in Europe.

Picasso Sells for $11.3 Million in London as Market Nerves Ease   A Picasso painting of his mistress Dora Maar fetched 5.7 million pounds ($11.3 million) at a Christie's International auction last night in London as dealers said demand held up in the year's first test of the impressionist and modern art market.

ASU Art Museum Receives $1.4 Million Bequest from German Artist  TEMPE, ARIZONA - Wilhelmine "Helme" Prinzen passed away in late 2007 and left her more than $1 million estate in Paradise Valley to the ASU Art Museum, part of the Herberger College of the Arts at Arizona State University. Originally she planned for her bequest to remain anonymous, but later changed her mind to encourage others to consider including the ASU Art Museum in their estate planning.