Displaying items by tag: art collection

When Ruth Horwich, a fixture in Chicago’s art community for over fifty-five years, passed away in July 2014, she left behind an extraordinarily diverse and deeply personal art collection. Horwich and her husband, Leonard, began collecting art in the late 1950s, often focusing  on unknown and emerging artists. The couple amassed a fascinating collection that included works by Chicago Imagists, European Surrealists, and self-taught and folk artists. They also acquired many notable pieces by Robert Matta, Alexander Calder, and Jean Dubuffet.

In addition to growing her collection, Horwich was dedicated to providing key support to many Chicago art institutions.

The Swiss family foundation that reportedly sold a painting by Paul Gauguin to the Qatar Museums Authority for a record $300 million has withdrawn the long-term loan of its 19th- and 20th-century art collection from the Kunstmuseum Basel. Gauguin’s oil painting of two Tahitian girls, "Nafea Faa Ipoipo (When Will You Marry?)," was one of eighteen works lent to the museum by the Rudolf Staechelin Family Trust after the death of the Swiss collector in 1946.

The museum said in a statement that it “profoundly regrets” the loss of the collection, which includes Impressionist and Post-Impressionist pieces by Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Cézanne, Édouard Manet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Camille Pissarro.

Swiss dealer Bruno Bischofberger will open a gigantic new Zurich gallery to the public in June 2015 with a solo show by Spanish painter Miquel Barceló.

Spread over 250,000 square feet, the complex is currently open by appointment only. It comprises galleries, offices, storage, as well as spaces for Bischofberger's extensive art collection. A folk art museum is also in the pipeline.

The new complex has been years in the making and radically transforms the site of a former car factory in the south east of the city.

George Washington University plans to sell the historic schoolhouse in Georgetown that it took control of this summer as part of a court approved breakup of the financially-troubled Corcoran Gallery of Art. The agreement sent the museum’s art collection to the National Gallery of Art and allowed the university to absorb its College of Art and Design.

The university said it has selected TTR Sotheby’s International Realty to list the historic brick building, known as the Fillmore, and its one acre of property. The initial sale price is $14 million.

Two Pennsylvania museums have begun dividing more than 500 pieces of art bequeathed to them by the late Pittsburgh Tribune-Review publisher Richard Mellon Scaife.

Officials with the Brandywine River Museum of Art near Philadelphia met Wednesday in Greensburg with their colleagues at the Westmoreland Museum of American Art.

Scaife, the billionaire banking heir who died July 4 at age 82, willed the paintings to the museums. They divided more than 140 of the most sought-after works of art Wednesday by taking turns, and will divvy up the rest in the coming days.

The similarities between two art works being auctioned next month by Christie’s and Sotheby’s in New York are striking. Both were created by the Austrian Expressionist Egon Schiele. And both once belonged to Fritz Grünbaum, a Viennese cabaret performer whose large art collection was inventoried by Nazi agents after he was sent to the Dachau concentration camp, where he died.

But there is also a notable difference in the way the houses are handling the sales.

The Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA) has cleared its biggest remaining hurdle to secure its art collection. Last week, the city of Detroit reached a settlement with its largest holdout creditor, the Financial Guaranty Insurance Company (FGIC). As Detroit’s 16-month-long bankruptcy trial comes to a close this week, the 11th-hour deal all but guarantees that the DIA’s collection will not be sold to pay down the city’s debt.

The bond insurer FGIC—which is owed around $1bn of Detroit’s $18bn debt—was one of the most vocal opponents to the so-called “Grand Bargain”, a scheme to safeguard the DIA’s collection while generating money for the city’s pensioners.

When Christie's auctioned off Edgar Degas' “Danseuses” for nearly $11 million in 2009, the catalog noted that the masterpiece was being sold as part of a restitution agreement with the “heirs of Ludwig and Margret Kainer,” German Jews whose vast art collection was seized by the Nazis in the years leading up to World War II.

But now a dozen relatives of the Kainers are stepping forward to object. Not only did they fail to benefit from that sale, they say they were never even told about it, or any other auctions of works once owned by the couple, including pieces by Monet and Renoir.

The Domaine de Chantilly in France is honoring the prized collections of the Condé Museum with a special exhibition of 14th and 15th century Italian paintings. The exhibit, “Fra Angelico, Botticelli…Rediscovered Masterpieces” is on view through January 4, 2015. One of the highlights of the exhibition is the reunion of five of the six paintings that comprise the Fra Angelico Thebaïde. But, one is still missing…

Twenty miles north of Paris, the Domaine de Chantilly houses the Condé Museum with a painting collection that makes it second only to the world famous Louvre Museum for ancient paintings (prior to 1850) . Along with a significant art collection, the chateau features magnificent gardens, grand stables and a world-class hippodrome (horse race course).

Construction is on track at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), where workers put the last steel beam in place on the massive expansion Wednesday, writes ABC‘s local San Francisco affiliate. The building, designed by architecture firm Snøhetta, is being erected behind the institution’s current home, the work of Mario Botta.

SFMOMA has been closed for construction since June of 2013. The old building had seen roughly 11.5 million visitors cross its threshold since opening in SOMA (short for South of Market) in 1995, and was ill-equipped to accommodate the museum’s growing popularity and collection.