With barely time for breath, the art crowd will be packing its Prada after Frieze (which ends on Sunday), and heading off to Paris for Fiac [Foire Internationale d’Art Contemporain], France’s prime contemporary art fair. The fair opens in the nave of the soaring, steel-and-glass Grand Palais on Thursday, with a separate section for younger galleries and editions in a courtyard of the Louvre.

Fiac, thought somewhat stodgy during the craze for the hippest, most cutting-edge, has survived the crisis better than some of its competitors. Its conservatism plays well to today’s market, as collectors eschew the unknown and return to the tried-and-trusted. This year it has bolstered its range with a fair-within-a-fair featuring 10 major dealers including Acquavella, Thomas Amman, Beyeler, Richard Gray and PaceWildenstein: each will show just two blue-chip works of art. Picasso, Kupka, Mondrian, Léger and Francis Bacon are among the offerings. Prices are consequential – for example, Brancusi’s elegant polished bronze “Mlle Pogany I” (1913) at L&M Arts carries a tag of more than $30m.

Meanwhile younger galleries showing emerging artists are grouped in the Cour Carrée of the Louvre. Department store group Galeries Lafayette is backing part of this section: one of France’s most active contemporary art collectors is Guillaume Houzé, whose family owns the store.

Star auctioneer Simon de Pury, chairman of Phillips de Pury – which now belongs to the Russian luxury-goods company Mercury – unveils an exhibition of his own photographs at The Corner gallery in Berlin on Wednesday. The show adds another layer of complexity to the multi-talented De Pury, who has been a curator, art dealer, adviser and auction house specialist, as well as bursts of activity as a DJ. There is never a chink in the armour of the perfectly polished De Pury, and his photographs certainly do not reveal anything more about him – they are mainly close-ups of the everyday, from bathroom tiles and Venetian blinds to shelves in a Japanese supermarket. Even “Self Portrait” (2008), taken in a luxury hotel (his natural habitat), just shows his feet propped on a glass table, beside his mobile. The prints are priced at €6,000.

And then they were three ... another fair organiser is hoping to fill the gap left by the demise of London’s Grosvenor House Antiques Fair. The latest contender is the husband-and-wife team of Brian and Anna Haughton, who organise the annual ceramics fair in London and two events in New York. They are planning “Art Antiques London”, to be held in a marquee in Kensington Gardens, from June 9-16 2010. They are up against two other hopefuls also planning a new June fair – one is “Masterpiece”, a consortium of London dealers led by Mallett and Apter Fredericks, the other is a partnership of two French dealers. A new event would fill a gap in the Haughtons’ portfolio: for economic reasons, they have cancelled or postponed three other fairs – an unsuccessful attempt to establish a fair in Dubai as well as the Asian art and Art + Design fairs in New York.

Monet’s ‘Canotiers à Argenteuil’ (1874)

Attend any major impressionist and modern auction in London or New York and in the front rows is a line of the Nahmad clan, with wives, daughters, nephews, girlfriends. The Nahmads, who are among the richest art traders in the world, are always a lively presence in the saleroom, arguing even as they bid or making cutting gestures to indicate they want the bid split, as they mop up multiple works. They are so well-known to the salerooms that they dispense with a bidding paddle altogether. “Sold – to all six of you!” quipped one auctioneer recently as he brought down the hammer.

The Nahmads are famous for squirrelling away their blue-chip auction buys – Miró, Picasso, Modigliani and others. And when they put on a show in their Cork Street gallery, it is worth seeing. This week in London the Helly Nahmad gallery unveiled a Monet retrospective with 17 works from the Nahmad’s own stockpile (including “Canotiers à Argenteuil”, 1874 (above) and “Voiliers sur le petit bras de la Seine”, 1872, both bought at auction), loans from private collections and from Kunsthaus Zurich. But don’t ask for prices – none of the works is for sale, according to the gallery.

Part of a $310m group of Rothko paintings, sold earlier this year by a financier involved in the Madoff scandal, will be put on show in Moscow’s Garage centre for contemporary art early next year. The 13 works were part of the collection of J Ezra Merkin, whose Ascot Partners had invested billions with Madoff. Merkin is facing charges of steering funds to Madoff (which he denies). He sold the Rothkos in a deal brokered by Marc Glimcher of PaceWildenstein gallery, but the identity of the buyer has remained a mystery. With news of the Moscow show, speculation has focused on Roman Abramovich, boyfriend of the Garage’s founder. However, a spokesman for the centre firmly denied that Abramovich is the new owner of the Rothkos.

Hubert Gerhard’s ‘River God’

The Tomasso brothers – Giovanni Dino and Raffaello, sculpture dealers from Leeds – are exhibiting in New York at the Williams Moretti and Irving gallery (until 24 October). The Tomassos specialise in rediscovering works; this show has a Giambologna “Prometheus bringing fire to Mankind”, an early autograph work that they identified, priced at $1.7m; a muscular bronze “River God” by the Dutch mannerist sculptor Hubert Gerhard (about $3m); and a late 18th-century “Dying Gaul” bronze, a reproduction of the piece in the Capitoline Museum in Rome ($10,000).

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