Displaying items by tag: Paintings

On September 24^th, Christie’s presented their American Furniture, Folk Art, and Decorative Arts Sale in New York. Spanning the 18^th and 19^th centuries, works included furniture from the Wunsch Americana Foundation, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and American folk art and maritime paintings. The sale was 85% sold by lot and 93% by value.

The top lot was a Chippendale carved mahogany easy chair that was entrusted to Christie’s by the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Estimated at $600,000-$900,000 and attributed to the renowned yet mysterious Garvan carver, the chair brought in $1.16 million, the third highest price ever paid for the form. “We are thrilled to have been the successful bidders on the Garvan Carver easy chair. It is a wonderful chair,” said Todd Prickett of C.L. Prickett who specializes in American antiques. The Museum will use the funds for new acquisitions.

Another lot that brought in more than expected was a Queen Anne Japanned Maple Bureau Table. One of about forty known examples of japanned furniture from colonial America, it is the only bureau table known to exist. Estimated at $60,000-$90,000, the table sold for $98,500.

Two paintings by the maritime artist, Antonio Nicolo Gasparo Jacobsen (1850–1921), sold for more than their estimates that ranged from $12,000 to $18,000. The Paddlewheel Steamer St. John went for $45,000 while Fred B Dalzell went for $25,000.

Not all lots did as well as anticipated. A pair of Federal eagle-inlaid mahogany side chairs attributed to William Singleton were estimated at $60,000 to $90,000 but only sold for $32,500. The pair of chairs had been lent to the Diplomatic Reception Rooms at the Department of State in 1968 and remained in the Monroe Reception Room as part of a larger set of four related chairs until they were returned to the Wunsch Americana Foundation. Until know, the location of this particular pair was unknown.

When Beth Feeback, an artist based in North Carolina, bought two paintings at her local thrift shop for just $9.99, she assumed they were a couple of outdated pieces from the 1970s. Feeback brought her purchases home and planned to cover the works with her signature oversized cat faces. Luckily, Feeback turned the paintings around before going to work on her feline creations.

A closer look at the thrift store finds revealed a label identifying Ilya Bolotowsky (1907–1981), a leading 20^th century abstract painter, as the artist of one of the works. The label also indicated that the painting had once been on display at the Weatherspoon Art Gallery at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. After a couple of Google searches, Feeback realized that she had something special on her hands.

The bidding began at Sotheby’s on September 21^st and the painting, identified as Vertical Diamond, sold for much more than expected. While the estimated auction price was set at $15,000 to $20,000, the painting ended up selling for $34,500. Feeback told ABC that her and her husband planned to renovate their home and pay down some debts with the sale’s proceeds. As an homage to Bolotowsky, Feeback will re-create Vertical Diamond, but with giant cat faces painted in the middle.

Before her death in 2007, Brooke Astor was a fixture in New York City’s elite inner circle. A tireless philanthropist and champion of the arts, Astor left behind a legacy marked by kindness, generosity, and good taste.

Sotheby’s has announced an auction of the contents of two of Astor’s estates – her legendary Park Avenue duplex and her country estate, Holly Hill, in Briarcliff Manor, NY. A total of 901 items including European and Asian furnishings, Old Master paintings, Qing Dynasty paintings, tea sets, silverware, jewelry, a porcelain menagerie, and over 100 dog paintings will head to the auction block September 24–25. Per Astor’s request, proceeds from the sale will go to the institutions and causes she held dear including the New York Public Library, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Bronx Zoo, Central Park, the Animal Medical Center of New York, New York City’s public school system, and a number of charities in Maine. Sotheby’s expects the sale to bring in between $6 and $9 million for the entire collection.

An icon of New York society and refinement, Astor spent her final years suffering from dementia. After her death at 105, her estate remained in limbo due a family dispute that lasted five years. The feud ended in March of 2012 and $100 million of Astor’s estate was freed for her charities. The amount going to Anthony Marshall, her only son, was cut by more than half as he was convicted of taking advantage of his mother’s deteriorating mental state and altering her will to his advantage.

Among the most coveted of Astor’s pieces that will be headed to Sotheby’s are an Imperial Chinese gilt-bronze lion clock slated to bring in around $180,000–$220,000 and an emerald and diamond necklace with earrings estimated at $280,000– $390,000 for both.

Jeffrey Gundlach, the chief executive officer of DoubleLine Capital LP, was the victim of a multi-million dollar burglary last week. After returning to his Santa Monica residence, the so-called ”bond guru” found $10 million worth of assets missing including several paintings, a 2010 Porsche Carrera 4S, watches, wine, and cash. At least ten paintings, including pieces by Jasper Johns (b. 1930), Piet Mondrian (1872–1944), and Guy Rose (1867–1925) were taken. Gundlach, a well-known connoisseur of fine art, is offering a $200,000 reward for any information leading to the recovery of the goods.

The burglary occurred sometime between September 12 at 3PM and September 14 at 8PM as Gundlach was in New York at the Bloomberg Markets 50 Summit. The investigation is ongoing.

Art fairs like the Paris Biennale, opening Friday, bring out the two salient features of the new art market: Prices are nearly all beyond the reach of average budgets, and most of the youngest dealers are already in their 40s or 50s.

World records tumbled during the past season, prompting lyrical celebrations in the news media. Auction houses love it. Should we too, seeing the records as homage paid by growing numbers of art lovers? Hardly. Seemingly paradoxical in recessionary times, records merely highlight the huge price rise of the art of the past over five decades.

True, this increase has not been uniform. Even as records are being set, wild estimates fail to be matched and some works sell at levels that leave their consignors with severe losses.

A 500-year-old sculpture looted by the Nazis for Adolf Hitler's planned “Fuehrermuseum” in the Austrian city of Linz was today returned to heirs of the original owner by Dresden’s state art collections.

The wooden sculpture of St. Peter was one of about 560 artworks seized from Jewish collectors for Hitler’s museum. The Germany-based family to whom the sculpture has been restituted does not wish to be identified by name and plans to keep the artwork, according to Gilbert Lupfer, the head of provenance research for Dresden’s public art collections.

The American Folk Art Museum barely avoided extinction last year when it was forced to sell its ill-suited building on West 53rd Street in Manhattan and retreat to its much smaller branch space at 2 Lincoln Square. Now it is modestly spreading it wings and trying to set more of its great collection before the public by collaborating with other institutions.

It has, for example, lent 14 works to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for its new American Wing galleries. Another fruit of this approach is the exuberant and wide-ranging “Compass: Folk Art in Four Directions,” a dense exhibition of nearly 200 works shoehorned into four galleries in the early-19th-century row houses that are now the home of the South Street Seaport Museum.

Bob Dylan’s career as a painter is soured by the fact that many people first encountered his brushwork on the cover of his worst album, 1970’s Self Portrait; it features, appropriately, a self-portrait. His head appears to be floating in the pale blue ether and his nose and mouth are exaggerated blobs resting on his face. The lines are otherwise hard-edged and coarse, adding to the painting’s dubiously caricaturelike style, which borders on incompetence. The word “worst” is not used lightly.

In his 2004 autobiography, Chronicles, Mr. Dylan himself admitted, in so many words, how powerful a failure Self Portrait was. His description of recording the album could just as easily pass for an account of painting its cover: “I just threw everything I could think of at the wall and whatever stuck, released it, and then went back and scooped up everything that didn’t stick and released that too.”

Give a celebrity a canvas and you often end up with a disaster. Artwork by stars gives rise to a paradox: audiences would likely not care about the work if it hadn’t come from the hand of someone famous, but the final conclusion is typically “Don’t quit your day job.” As always, Mr. Dylan is a different kind of beast. His first exhibition of paintings in New York, “The Asia Series,” opened this week at the uptown branch of Gagosian, the largest gallery in the world. On view right now at Gagosian’s other locations are solo shows by the likes of Richard Serra, Andy Warhol, Dan Colen and Robert Rauschenberg. Mr. Dylan is no Rauschenberg, but the pairing of the singer with Gagosian makes sense, in a kind of Warholian sense of celebrity. It is a union of two men—roughly the same age—who are at a point in their careers where they can do anything they want with little risk to their reputations. Mr. Dylan can paint scenes, heavily influenced by Gauguin’s Tahiti works, of his misadventures in Japan, Korea, China and Vietnam that cast his subjects as radically other, and Larry Gagosian can show them.

Opium, for instance, which Mr. Dylan painted in 2009, is quite simply perverse. A young woman lounges in a cluttered bedroom, eyes shut in a loopy opiate haze. Scattered about the scene are a fan, a vase with what appears to be bamboo, containers of makeup and a large pipe. The woman rests angelically, framed in a come-hither pose that is directed entirely at the male artist. The Gagosian exhibition is being touted as “a visual journal of his travels” and comprises “firsthand depictions of people, street scenes, architecture and landscape.” Presumably, Mr. Dylan was in this opium den, gazing at this young woman, approaching her but never arriving for the sake of his art. Whether or not that is true does not matter. For years, people believed Mr. Dylan grew up in a traveling circus and hoboed his way across the country in freight train boxcars because he lied to a publicist at Columbia Records back in the ’60s.

Perversity and possible inauthenticity aside, Opium is not a bad painting, but one wonders how much of its interest rests on the person making it rather than on the quality of the work itself. It is not just a depiction of a young woman on drugs, it is a depiction of a young woman on drugs made by the man who wrote “Like a Rolling Stone.” It is all the more tempting to draw connections between Mr. Dylan the singer and Mr. Dylan the painter because the styles overlap—he is, at once, effortless and portentous. Opium showcases the same strange interplay of universality and narcissism that is also at stake in much of his music, especially the later songs. The oversexualized image recalls the opening line of Mr. Dylan’s 2006 Modern Times album, a line so specifically about Mr. Dylan himself that it somehow taps into an identifiable desire: “I was thinking ’bout Alicia Keys/I couldn’t keep from crying/she was born in Hell’s Kitchen/I was living down the line.” Few people could get away with such a lyric. No matter what one thinks of Alicia Keys, he manages to turn the humorous sexual pining of a dirty old man into a gloomy commentary on the inevitability of age and impotency. But would we care if that line was sung by, say, Paul Simon? Looking at his artwork, it is hard not to consider the very real possibility that we forgive Mr. Dylan a certain level of mediocrity because when he is good he is so much better than anyone else.

As pot and kettle moments go, having Jeffrey Archer accuse you of vulgarity is surely up there with the best of them – but Alastair Sooke, recipient of this eye-opening rebuke, handled it pretty well in The World's Most Expensive Paintings.

He didn't bridle or protest. He merely pointed out the silver-gilt cigarette box on a nearby table, crafted into the form of a paperback edition of Archer's Kane and Abel. A nice net-cord volley, I thought. Quite why Sooke had gone to see Archer I'm still not entirely sure, because the smug little perjurer didn't really have anything very illuminating to say about the subject under discussion. Perhaps they just wanted to get a look at his penthouse apartment. Or perhaps they wanted to show you that in the world of the super-paintings even someone as rich as Archer is a comparative pauper. The cheapest painting Sooke focused on here – in a film that took its structure from a Top Ten countdown – had cost its buyer just a little under $73m. Well, not just a little perhaps, given that it was $160,000 under. But mere loose change to the kind of oligarchs and billionaires who haunt the New York salerooms.

Next up was Rubens's Massacre of the Innocents, which made the point that a collector's obsession often lies behind the stratospheric prices some paintings command. When a rarity comes up – and the acquisitive egos of several very rich people collide in one room – there's no saying when the gavel will finally come down. In the case of Massacre of the Innocents it was at £76,529,058 and it went to the Canadian billionaire Kenneth Thomson, a lifetime collector who actually had the decency to put his trophies into a public gallery so that everyone could share them. That doesn't always happen. The Japanese paper magnate who bought Van Gogh's Portrait of Dr Gachet and Renoir's Bal du Moulin de la Galette in a breathtaking spending spree in 1990 wouldn't even let his family look at them, and threatened to burn them both when he ran into financial difficulties. They haven't been seen in public since.

There was a bit of desultory reflection on the disconnection between price and value, with Sooke allowing himself to hint that the $87m an Estée Lauder heir paid for Klimt's Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer was considerably over the odds if artistic merit was all that counted. And a French collector called François Pinault, who has a stunning contemporary collection in Venice, tutted sadly about the vulgarity of some of the big recent buyers, who care less about the art than showing that they have the ability to buy it. But it wasn't really until the last 15 minutes that the film began to acquire any real bite, as Sooke explored the recent history of several paintings by the world's "ultimate luxury brand" – Pablo Picasso. The fate of La Rêve was particularly touching. It was bought in the Forties by Victor and Sally Ganz, a middle-class New York couple who paid $7,000 for it – the equivalent of two years' rent and a sum they could only just scrape together. Fifty years on it was in the ownership of a Las Vegas casino owner called Steve Wynn, who was on the brink of selling it for $139m when he accidentally put his elbow through the canvas. The Ganz's daughter talked with rueful common sense about its transformation from an object of aesthetic obsession to a kind of high-stakes poker chip. Sooke, as usual an affable presence on screen, couldn't quite match her for gravitas and authority. He's a good presenter already – he could be a very good one if he thought a bit harder about the words he uses. To describe a Rubens masterpiece as "a total, total knockout!", as he did earlier in the programme, falls some way short of what's required.

A technique for peering under the surface of classic paintings came with a risk: The old, precious artwork had to be removed and transported through changing environments to the machine that would bombard it with X-rays.

A new mobile scanning device is sparing art lovers from a potential heart attack by allowing scientists to examine a painting right where it hangs. The new scanner already has led to surprising revelations about how the Old Masters went about their work, scientists announced yesterday (March 29) at the American Chemical Society meeting in Anaheim, Calif.

Finding long-hidden layers and changes made to the art is like watching over the artist's shoulder as he paints, said study author Matthias Alfeld, of the University of Antwerp in Belgium. "It says something about the history of the painting and about the surrounding of the artist when he worked," Alfeld told LiveScience.

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The technique is called scanning macro X-ray fluorescence analysis. Alfeld and his colleagues used it on more than 20 paintings from the 16th through the 19th centuries, including works by Rembrandt, Caravaggio and Rubens.