Displaying items by tag: Manet

A $5 million reward for masterworks stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum a quarter century ago has failed to lead to their recovery, prompting authorities Tuesday to announce a new offer: $100,000 for the return of one of the least valuable items, a bronze eagle finial.

The reward far exceeds the value of the 10-inch-high gilded eagle, which was swiped from the top of a pole supporting a silk Napoleonic flag. It was taken along with 12 other pieces valued at $500 million, including masterpieces by Vermeer, Rembrandt, and Manet, in what remains the world’s largest art heist and one of Boston’s most baffling crime mysteries.

Contrary to popular opinion, James Abbott McNeill Whistler's famous 1871 painting "Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1," better known as "Portrait of the Artist's Mother," is not a harsh and puritanical portrayal of a matriarch. It's a homage to the rich and tender relationship shared by a mother and her loving son, says Norton Simon Museum associate curator Emily Beeny.

The painting, made in London while the artist's mother, Anna, was living with him at Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, was the last Whistler would submit to the Royal Academy of Art.

165 years ago, the Knoedler Gallery opened its doors in New York and went on to help create some of the country’s most celebrated collections including those of Paul Mellon, Henry Clay Frick, and Robert Sterling Clark. Throughout the years, top-notch works by artists such as van Gogh, Manet, Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent, Louise Bourgeois, and Willem de Kooning passed through the gallery. When the Soviet government sold hundreds of paintings from the State Hermitage Museum in Leningrad in the 1930s, they chose to work with Knoedler to sell paintings by masters like Rembrandt, Raphael, and Velazquez.

Knoedler’s exemplary past is often forgotten as the gallery’s present has been mired in lawsuits and accusations that the company’s former president, Ann Freedman, was in the business of selling fakes. Last year, Knoedler Gallery closed its doors for good.

This week, Los Angeles’ Getty Research Institute announced that it had bought the Knoedler Gallery archive. Spanning from around 1850 to 1971, the archive includes stock books, sales books, a photo archive and files of correspondence, including letters from artists and collectors, some with illustrations. The Getty was interested in Knoedler’s archive because it offers an expansive glimpse into the history of collecting and the art market in the United States and Europe from the mid-19^th century to modern times.

The archive was purchased from Knoedler’s owner, Michael Hammer, for an undisclosed amount. Meticulously preserved, the archive will be available to scholars and digitized for online research after the Getty catalogues and conserves it all.

In the teeth of the recession, the Ashmolean museum iin Oxford has succeeded in raising £7.83m in less than eight months, through lottery grants and more than a thousand donations from members of the public, to buy a major work by the 19th century French painter Edouard Manet which would otherwise have left the country.

The Portrait of Madame Claus, a study for one of his most famous paintings, Le Balcon, regarded as a key work in the development of Impressionist art, was sold last year for £28.5m, after being in a private collection in England since it was bought from the artist's studio in 1884. The comparative bargain price the museum paid represents the tax breaks for works of art going to national collections.

In a contest for the title of most reviled artist, Edouard Manet would be well placed to win.

It was only after his death of tertiary syphilis at age 51, in 1883, that he was recognized as one of the great masters of the 19th century. Placing him in the history of art, however, is not an easy task.

The Impressionists regarded him as their leader and were disappointed when he refused to participate in their exhibitions. Degas called him a traitor.

In 1910, the first Post-Impressionist show in London, organized by Roger Fry, treated him as the forerunner of Cezanne, Gauguin and Van Gogh. Today, we tend to see him as the man who invented modernity.

That’s, in fact, the subtitle of a huge exhibition at the Musee d’Orsay in Paris. Nonetheless, the show firmly embeds Manet in the tradition of French painting, surrounding his works with some by his more conventional colleagues. The Manichaean way of separating academic art and avant-garde, we are told by the curators, makes no sense.

In the first room, 19 works by Manet are confronted with nine by his teacher Thomas Couture. Traditionally, Manet’s six years of apprenticeship are dismissed as of no great consequence, and it’s true the teacher was horrified by the pupil’s “Absinthe Drinker,” the first of his many paintings rejected by the Salon. It’s on display here as an etching.