Next week, Abu Dhabi is holding a ceremony to mark the start of construction of the Louvre Abu Dhabi, the vast new museum designed by French architect Jean Nouvel that will be one of the cornerstones of the Saadiyat Island cultural project. The five cultural institutions planned for the island, including a Guggenheim, are due to start opening from 2014.

Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Abu Dhabi’s ruler, and Nicolas Sarkozy, France’s president, will be at next week’s ceremony and will be able to admire some of the works of art that have been acquired for the future museum, which will be displayed at the Emirates Palace hotel. Intense secrecy has surrounded these first acquisitions but sources in Paris have confirmed that one of the main prizes is Mondrian’s “Composition avec bleu, rouge, jaune et noir” (1922), which sold for €21.7m at the Yves Saint Laurent sale in Paris in February. Other Louvre Abu Dhabi buys are said to include Limoges enamels, Gothic figures and tapestries. Also going to the Gulf is the top lot in the Yves Saint Laurent sale, Matisse’s “Les coucous, tapis bleu et rose” (1911), which made €35.9m. The same sources say it was bought by a member of the Qatari royal family.

The Iranian filmmaker, poet and photographer Abbas Kiarostami is so enraged with the British authorities that he is shunning the opening of a show of his photographs in London next week, as well as the premiere of his production of Così fan tutte at the English National Opera on May 29.

Citing “disgraceful treatment” by officials from the British embassy in Tehran, Kiarostami says he withdrew his visa application after he was asked twice, within a few hours, for his fingerprints. “When I pointed out that my fingerprints were unlikely to have changed in [this] extremely short period of time ... I was told that this method had been used to catch over 5,000 criminals worldwide,” he said, adding that he “deeply resented” the implication that he was a criminal. The show at Purdy Hicks gallery runs from May 26 to 30 and features three series of Kiarostami’s photographs that focus on roads in landscapes, images of nature blurred by rain, and a starkly beautiful portrayal of trees against snow. This, a single image printed on to canvas, is the most expensive work in the show at £25,000. The other photographs, in editions of two, are priced at £12,000-£15,000.

Christie’s has been issued with a lawsuit because, says the plaintiff, the auctioneer reopened bidding on a work of art he had just bought over the telephone. The court action has been brought in New York by shipping mogul and collector Gregory Callimanopulos, who offered $3m for “Grey”, a 1954 Sam Francis abstract, at Christie’s evening sale of contemporary and modern art in Manhattan on April 13. Callimanopulos claims the firm’s star auctioneer, Christopher Burge, sold him the picture, then reopened bidding after spotting a bidder in the room as the hammer went down. The painting sold to the Eli Broad Foundation for $3.66m including premium. Christie’s have declined to comment, beyond stating that it acted in complete accordance with its conditions of sale.

“Crossover buyers” is the art market term for those who start buying in a field that is not their usual beat and they were much in evidence at Sotheby’s recent and successful sales of tribal art in New York on May 15. The sales featured some particularly desirable works, including an 81-lot collection of African pieces amassed in the 1930s by sculptor Chaim Gross and his wife Renee, which exceeded expectations by fetching $4.9m with 80 per cent sold by lot. “Five of the top 10 buyers in this part of the sale came from different fields, such as antiquities or modern and contemporary art,” says Sotheby’s specialist Jean Fritts.

Other crossover buyers were active in the various owners sale, which made $5.7m, albeit with a higher buy-in rate of 32 per cent. Asked why people were crossing over into the tribal art field, Fritts cited “a combination of the excellent provenance of many works, a larger number than usual of Oceanic pieces, and the prices, which relative to the paintings market, are still much, much lower.”

Top lot at the sales was an ancestor figure from Congo (pictured above), which doubled its estimate at $1.3m, while an Urama Iriwáke figure from Papua New Guinea made $1.2m. This was one of seven Oceanic pieces that came from the famed collector John Friede. His whole collection was promised to San Francisco’s de Young museum of Asian art but Friede has been embroiled in a squabble with his two brothers over their mother’s estate, and also has to repay a $25m loan from Sotheby’s. Six of the Friede lots sold, for $2.4m, and another three lots will be sold in Paris on June 17. But, as elsewhere, prices have eased in this market: another Friede piece, a Torres Strait drum from Papua New Guinea, made $698,500 (estimate $300,000- $500,000). Friede had bought it for more than $1m at Christie’s Paris in 2006.

Georgina Adam is editor-at-large of The Art Newspaper