Tomorrow Dreweatts & Bloomsbury Auctions will begin a two-week online sales partnership with Paddle8 for Unconditional: Rare Prints and Editions with Zero BP (excerpt from Paddle8’s press release below.) But today Deweatts & Bloomsbury announced that George Bailey, formerly of Sotheby’s and founder of The Auction Room, will join the company as Chairman and inaugurate a partnership between the Dreweatts & Bloomsbury and The Auction Room.

The Stanley Gibbons Group plc announces the appointment of George Bailey as Chairman of Dreweatts & Bloomsbury Auctions, the art and antiques auctions subsidiary of The Stanley Gibbons Group plc with effect from 1 September 2014.

With over 35 years’ experience in the fine art and auction industry, George is best known for his career at Sotheby’s as a key member of the firm’s European management team and as an exceptional auctioneer.

In March 2013, George launched The Auction Room, an innovative ‘on-line only’ auction portal, that has enjoyed marked successes with sales of notable collections including Middle Eastern Contemporary art from the Saatchi Gallery and Scottish paintings from the Fleming Collection.  The Auction Room will continue to trade as an online auction platform running its own calendar of sales in addition to hosting regular Dreweatts & Bloomsbury Auctions and other third party events. It has recently moved its offices to Bloomsbury House on Mayfair’s Maddox Street following the recent £500,000 dispersal of items from the Royal Agricultural Society of England collection, handled in partnership with Dreweatts & Bloomsbury Auctions.

Here’s Paddle8 on their Unconditional sale with Dreweatts & Bloomsbury which starts tomorrow:

Paddle8 is delighted to partner with Dreweatts & Bloomsbury auctions to present Unconditional: Rare Prints and Editions with Zero BP, an auction that offers collectors a unique opportunity to purchase works without paying the usual “buyer’s premium” or “BP”, the additional fee that is a percentage of the final sale price and is typical of all auctions. This is the first in the Unconditional series, a program of four online-only auctions with 0% buyer’s
premium that Paddle8 will host with Bloomsbury. The series launches with Unconditional: Rare Prints and Editions with Zero BP, a sale of prints and photographs by coveted modern and contemporary artists, including Andy Warhol, Francis Bacon, Roy Lichtenstein, and Julie Mehretu. Bidding is available on Paddle8.com from August 15 through August 31.

This special 0%-buyer’s-premium auction series continues Paddle8’s innovations to the traditional brick-and-mortar auction house model. For this auction, Paddle8 is not only bringing inventory to auction in a novel way—partnering with a respected regional auction house to present extraordinary, locally-sourced inventory to Paddle8’s global collecting audience through an online-only auction—but is introducing a pricing structure that deviates from the rigid format of traditional, physical auctions. Paddle8 has previously innovated the online auction space by significantly decreasing the fees for buyers and sellers, charging half of market norms. In addition, Paddle8 has established itself as a leader in bringing high-caliber, authenticated inventory to collectors worldwide through its partnerships with non-profit museums and foundations worldwide, and approaches Unconditional as a way to extend this innovative, collector-friendly model to for-profit partners.