Displaying items by tag: Old Masters

For the first time in Spain, the Museo del Prado is presenting a selection of 87 Spanish drawings dating from the 16th to the early 19th centuries from the Hamburger Kunsthalle. In terms of quality and quantity, this institution houses one of the most important collections of Spanish Old Master drawings outside Spain, numbering more than 200 works. Assembled in Seville in the early 19th century, it was subsequently sold on the London art market and acquired by the Hamburg museum in 1891.

The core of the collection comprises drawings by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo and by some of his most important contemporaries and followers, many of them associated with the Academy founded in Seville by Murillo, Juan de Valdés Leal and Francisco de Herrera the Younger. In addition, the exhibition includes important works by other leading Golden Age masters such as Alonso Cano and Antonio del Castillo.

Madrid innaugurates a new museum dedicated to Dutch and Flemish Old Masters this week, the Museo Carlos de Amberes.

The new museum, located in a former church in the well-heeled area of Barrio de Salamanca, will open its doors tomorrow with an inaugural ceremony attended by the King Felipe VI of Spain.

The museum heralds a new era for the Fundación Carlos de Amberes, which started as a charity back in 1594, when Philip II of Spain was also Lord of the Seventeen Provinces of the Netherlands.

Sotheby’s auction house is making a big push for its latest target -- the new wealthy along the West Coast of the U.S. -- by showing off more than $200 million of art.

Armed with highlights from its upcoming New York sales including canvases by Mark Rothko and Jasper Johns along with Old Master painting and jewelry, Sotheby’s starting this month will woo the rich from San Diego to Seattle with exhibitions, wine tastings and dinners in private homes.

One of the last great Turner masterpieces remaining in private hands will be the highlight of Sotheby’s London Evening sale of Old Master on 3rd December 2014. Painted in 1835 by Britain’s most celebrated artist, Rome, from Mount Aventine is among Turner’s most subtle and atmospheric depictions of the Italian city, a subject that captivated Turner for over twenty years. The large-scale oil painting is further distinguished by its exceptional state of preservation, as well as a prestigious and unbroken provenance, having changed hands for the only time in 1878, when it was acquired by the 5th Earl of Rosebery, later Prime Minister of Great Britain. The picture has remained in the Rosebery collection ever since and will be offered for sale with an estimate of £15-20 million.

Discussing the forthcoming sale, Alex Bell, Joint International Head and Co-Chairman of Sotheby’s Old Master Paintings Department said: “There are fewer than ten major Turners in private hands known today and this work must rank as one of the very finest.

Scholars tend to seek out the Morgan Library & Museum’s archives as a place to research old masters and 19th-century drawings, or to peek at the letters that modern masters like Chagall and Dubuffet wrote to the art dealer Pierre Matisse. But a recent gift from the Roy Lichtenstein estate will now make the Morgan a destination for classic contemporary artists, too.

While organizing the Morgan’s 2010 exhibition “Roy Lichtenstein: The Black-and-White Drawings, 1961-1968,” Isabelle Dervaux, curator of modern and contemporary drawings, and William M. Griswold, the Morgan’s director, got to know Dorothy Lichtenstein, the artist’s widow. It is because of that friendship, Mr. Griswold said, that Ms. Lichtenstein recently donated a group of sketchbooks and drawings from her husband’s estate to the Morgan.

Records tumbled this season in the highest-grossing flagship summer auctions that Sotheby’s London has ever seen. Together, sales in the four key categories of Old Masters, Impressionist & Modern, Contemporary Art and ‘Treasures’ totalled a record £360 million - with top estimates repeatedly smashed and record numbers of participants engaging in the sales.

The strong results were fuelled by a burgeoning interest from collectors from the new markets - many of whom are making their presence ever more strongly felt in Sotheby’s London salerooms, their interest constantly expanding into an ever broader range of fields.

Frieze has announced the participating galleries for Frieze Masters. Following acclaim for the first two editions of the fair, this year sees not only a particularly strong representation of galleries from the UK and US but also an ambitious global reach. Dedicated to art from ancient to modern, Frieze Masters will take place October 15–19, 2014 on Gloucester Green, Regent’s Park, London, and is sponsored by Deutsche Bank.

Described by the Financial Times as ‘Unrivalled among fairs worldwide for its quality, range, seductive displays and scholarly interest’, Frieze Masters is a carefully selected presentation of over 120 of the world’s leading galleries. Taking place at the same time as Frieze London, the two fairs ensure that London is the destination for the broadest international art audience and benefits from a crossover between audiences of contemporary and historical art.

Situated prominently at the eastern end of The Hague—not the city in the Netherlands, but a crescent-shaped inlet that feeds into the Elizabeth River as it passes through Norfolk, Virginia—the Chrysler Museum of Art’s newly renovated and expanded Italianate pile opened to the public again last week after 17 months of construction. Local firm H&A Architects designed identical, two-story porticoed gallery wings that flank the main entrance and added 10,000 square feet of exhibition space for American and European painting and sculpture and the museum’s renowned glass collection. The addition—which brings the total programmable space to 220,000 square feet—mimics the classical style of the original 1933 structure and a 1989 building project that unified the exteriors by removing asymmetrical and Brutalist additions completed in 1965 and 1974. “We wanted to maintain the balanced, palazzo house quality of the exterior,” explains museum director Bill Hennessey.

While the architecture may be conservative, not much else about the institution is, starting with its namesake, Walter Chrysler, Jr. The eldest son of the auto tycoon, Chrysler began amassing what would become a world-class art collection while still a student at Dartmouth in the early 1930s. Controversial dealings would eventually run the scion out of New York City, where he once served as the first chairman of the fledgling Museum of Modern Art’s library committee, and later the artists’ colony in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where he maintained a museum in a former church building during the 1960s.

When Robert Blumenthal decided to open his first gallery, he didn’t consider Chelsea, where most of his local contemporary-art peers operate.

He thought about the Lower East Side, where several younger art dealers have found lower rents, but in February, he opted for a third-floor location with distinctly un-Chelsea crown molding at 1045 Madison Ave., near 79th Street.

“The Upper East Side is so unhip, it’s hip,” said Mr. Blumenthal, 33 years old. “Chelsea is a generation before me.”

If you've ever wanted to wallpaper your living room with the work of the old masters, now's your chance. The Metropolitan Museum of Art this month released an astounding 394,000 high-resolution images to the public. Visitors to the Met’s website can sort images by artist, medium, location, and era, and freely download images that are generally at least 10 megapixels in size.

The Met’s collection is one of the most extensive in the world, with more than 500 Picassos available for download, along with dozens of paintings from Monet, Van Gogh, and Degas. Aside from European painters, the collection also includes photographs of Aztec stonework, Greek sculpture, and Chinese calligraphy. Looking for an image of a 200-year old spittoon from India? It's yours.