The month of September brought along with it the financial collapse of uncle Sam. Since Lehman Brother Holdings Inc., historical company active in financial services at a global level, announced its intention to file for Chapter 11, the procedure of “piloted failure” provided for by US law, a burdensome situation has been perceived and economists have seriously started questioning the future of the luxury industry. While ex employees were leaving the Lehman Brothers offices with their boxes, experts of the art market wondered what would happen in the future.
The main international economists are now claiming that the crisis of the financial markets, and the one of real estate markets, are definitely starting to affect also the art market. The economy is changing. Nobody can establish with precision which direction it will take. According to analysts next year will be comparable to the early Nineties, when prices fell by 44% in two years.
After a period in which auction houses registered a series of records, especially for contemporary art, which saw its prices multiplied in 2007, the wind has suddenly changed.
A similar situation to the one in 1989, a crisis that was overcome only in the mid-Nineties, with a fall back in 2001 when the Twin Towers collapsed, blocking for days the US financial system. Sotheby’s postponed to an unscheduled date its auctions in New York and the magnate of luxury Arnault supported Phillips. 

An original painting by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, portraying a “Naked Woman”, and a nature morte authenticated as a work by Edouard Manet, afterwards found to be a forgery, have been recovered by the Italian Carabinieri Corps of the operational department for the Protection of Cultural Heritage, which has arrested three people for complicity in receiving stolen goods.
A mature Renoir, probably old-aged given some uncertainties in the brushstroke, stolen in 1975, whose traces had been lost for 33 years.  At last, the original painting, which has been attributed without doubt to the impressionist artist, can now be seen in the splendour of the female figure’s white carnation on the background of a bright landscape thanks to the Carabinieri Corps, to art critic Vittorio Sgarbi and, by ironic fate, to a ball hit by a little girl.

Washington and Piacenza, apparently two places that having nothing to do with each other, but now have a common denominator, proposed by an exhibition that celebrates simultaneously in the same venue art masterpieces from these cities.  From 15th September to 18th January 2009 Palazzo Baldeschi al Corso in Perugia is hosting the exhibition “Corot to Picasso. Fattori to De Pisis” dedicated to the famous American Phillips Collection and to the Italian Collection of Ricci Oddi .
The exhibition, curated by Vittorio Sgarbi, is promoted by the Foundation Cassa di Risparmio di Perugia which is thus celebrating the Saving Bank’s 100th year.