Displaying items by tag: Manhattan

In December 2010, Pierre Konowaloff, the heir to Russian art collector Ivan Morozov, filed a lawsuit claiming that he was the rightful owner of Paul Cézanne’s (1839-1906) painting Madame Cézanne in the Conservatory (1891), not the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Konowaloff explained that Morozov’s art collection was seized by the Bolshevik regime in 1918 and that when Stephen Clark, the collector and museum trustee who bequeathed the work to the Met in 1960, first bought the painting from Knoedler & Company in 1933, he did not carry out due diligence. Accusing the Met of wrongful acquisition, possession, display and retention, Konowaloff demanded that the work be returned to him and requested restitution for monetary damages.

On December 18, a judge in the 2^nd District Court of Appeals in Manhattan ruled that the Met could keep the Cézanne masterpiece, as the museum remains the work’s rightful owner. The Met has stood behind their right to the painting since the beginning of the entanglement with Konowaloff. The lawsuit was initially dismissed in 2011 by judge Shira Scheindlin who said that a U.S. court has no basis for questioning a decision made by a foreign government on distant soil. After the rejection of Konowaloff’s appeal, Met officials can finally leave the dispute behind them.

Konowaloff filed a similar suit against Yale University in 2009 over Vincent van Gogh’s (1853-1890) The Night Café (1888). Konowaloff claimed that the van Gogh painting was also stolen during the Russian Revolution and bought by Clark regardless of its questionable history.

For the first time since announcing plans to renovate ten months ago, the New York Public Library has released a number of important project details. Located in a landmark building on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, the New York Public Library’s $300 million renovation will be overseen by the London-based firm, Foster & Partners.

Architect Norman Foster announced plans to clear out the back portion of the library, which is now occupied by seven floors of books. The 1.2 million ousted volumes will be relocated to a storage space under Bryant Park as well as another facility in Princeton, New Jersey. Most of the exiled books are now available digitally and library officials purposely chose rarely requested books to be relocated. With the newly freed up space, Foster plans to create a four-level atrium with curving balconies filled with bookshelves and reading tables overlooking Bryant Park. It will be the first time since the library was built in 1911 that patrons will be able to see the park.

The library received a fair amount of criticism after announcing plans to renovate. Critics claimed that officials were not forthcoming enough with project details and that the relocation of books stood in stark contrast to the institution’s purpose. In response, Foster revised plans and 3.3 million of the library’s 4.5 million volumes will remain on site.

The busiest public research library in the United States, the New York Public Library will span 100,000 square feet after renovations are complete. Construction is slated to begin this summer and is expected to last until 2018.

 

Mary Griggs Burke, who built the most comprehensive collection of Japanese art outside of Japan, passed away on December 8, 2012 at her home in Manhattan. She was 96.

Burke’s collection, which she amassed over fifty years, featured thousands of artifacts including paintings, prints, sculpture, textiles, lacquerware, ceramics, and calligraphy. Worth tens of millions of dollars, her meticulously assembled collection spans five millenniums and includes early pieces from around 3000 B.C. to works of the 19^th century A.D.

Burke was born in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1916, where she grew up in a Victorian mansion adorned with 18^th century French objets d’art as well as a few important Japanese artifacts. After earning a bachelor’s degree in 1938 from Sarah Lawrence College and a master’s in clinical psychology from Columbia, Burke traveled to Japan in 1954. Japanese-influenced Bauhaus architect, Walter Gropius, who was designing a house for Burke, suggested the visit. Burke immediately fell in love with Japan and its art and returned to the country dozens of times throughout her life.

Burke began avidly collecting Japanese art in 1963. Her holdings eventually grew so vast that they required their own residence. Burke purchased the apartment adjacent to her own on the Upper East Side of Manhattan to house her collection; she also employed a curatorial staff and encouraged students and scholars to visit. In 2006, Burke announced that after her death her collection would be divided between the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Burke served on the boards of many institutions, including the Met. At the time of her death she was an emeritus trustee of the museum.       

Two members of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York are suing the institution for deceiving the public by making patrons think that the suggested admission fees are mandatory. The historically free institution suggests entry fees of $25 for adults and less for seniors and students.

Theodore Grunewald and Patricia Nicholson files the suit in state court in Manhattan and said that the museum’s fee policy lacks transparency. They also argued that and that the museum fails to note that the fee is suggested on several of its websites and that it’s only in fine and barely legible print on signs near cash registers. A statute was put in place in 1893 declaring that the Met must remain free in order to continue receiving government funding.

Grunewald and Nicholson commissioned a survey of visitors to the museum and found that 85% of patrons believed they had to pay to gain entry.

A printmaker and painter, there is a quiet, striking quality that pervades all of Will Barnet’s art. Best known for his portraits of women, children, animals, family members, and friends, Barnet passed away at his home in Manhattan on November 13. He has lived at the National Arts Club building on New York City’s Gramercy Park since 1982. Barnet was 101.

A native of Beverly, Massachusetts, Barnet studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and then, starting in 1931, at the Arts Students League in New York. It was here that Barnet studied briefly with the early Modernist painter Stuart Davis and became acquainted with Arshile Gorky, a major influence on Abstract Expressionism. Four years after joining the League, Barnet was named the official printer and went on to work for the Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project. He also made prints for well-known artists such as the Mexican muralist Jose Clemente Orozco and the painter and cartoonist William Gropper.

Barnet started out as a Social Realist printmaker and had his first solo exhibition in 1935 at the Eighth Street Playhouse in Manhattan. Three years later, he had his first gallery show at the Hudson Walker Gallery. It was during this time that he married Mary Sinclair, a painter and fellow student. They had three sons.

In the 1940s Barnet was inspired by Modernist inclinations and his paintings became more colorful and fractured, depicting family scenes and young children. By the end of the decade Barnet moved towards complete abstraction after becoming involved with the Indian Space Painters, a group that created abstract paintings using forms from Native American art and modern European painting.

In the 1950s Barnet divorced Sinclair and remarried Elena Ciurlys with whom he had a daughter. It wasn’t until the 1960s that Barnet returned to representational painting, often using his wife and daughter as subjects. Barnet’s style had evolved and the portraits from this time are flatter and more exact. He also made a number of portraits of the architect Frederick Kiesler, the art critic Katherine Kuh, and the art collector Roy Neuberger during this time.

Barnet never stopped painting and continued to experiment and evolve stylistically, returning to abstraction in 2003. In 2010 he was the subject of the exhibition Will Barnet and the Art Students League at the Phyllis Harriman Mason Gallery in Manhattan. He was awarded a National Medal of Arts in 2011, which he accepted from President Obama at a ceremony at the White House. The subject of many museum retrospectives, Will Barnet at 100, which took place at the National Academy Museum in 2011, was the last.

   Besides his work as an artist, Barnet was also an influential instructor. He taught graphic arts and composition at the Art Students League in 1936 and went on to teach painting at the school until 1980. Barnet also taught at Cooper Union from 1945 to 1978 and briefly at Yale, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and other schools.

Barnet is survived by his wife, three sons, one daughter, nine grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren.

The Whitney Museum of American Art announced yesterday that it had received a $1 million grant from the Keith Haring Foundation. The endowment is to go towards exhibitions in the Museum’s downtown Manhattan building, which will open in 2015. Designed by Renzo Piano, the building is currently under construction and will allow the Whitney to increase the size and range of its exhibitions, programs, and permanent works on view.

The Museum began working with Haring in 1983 when he was presented for the first time in a Whitney Biennial and in The Comic Art Show at the Museum’s downtown branch. Adam D. Weinberg, the Alice Pratt Brown Director of the Whitney said, “Keith Haring was an extraordinary artist, exuberant, humane, passionate, and unflinching in his honesty. The Whitney has been a staunch supporter of Keith’s work for thirty years and this grant is a testament to our enduring relationship with Keith, his work, and his legacy.”

A year after his death, Haring went on to appear in the 1991 Whitney Biennial and in 1992 in an Independent Study Program exhibition, The Power of the City/The City of Power. The artist’s first full retrospective, Keith Haring, took place at the Whitney in 1997. He was also featured in American Century: Art and Culture 1950–2000 in 1999 and in 2010, the museum grew its Haring collection through a gift from longtime supporter of the Whitney, Emily Fisher Landau. The Whitney now counts four of his works in its permanent collection.

Talk about a "rogues" gallery.

Two Manhattan art dealers -- including the former longtime president of the prestigious Knoedler Gallery -- have been accused of selling forged paintings, and concocting phony stories about their origins, by a group that authenticates the artwork of famed abstract expressionist Robert Motherwell.

Explosive court papers allege that Ann Freedman -- who left Knoedler amid questions about the paintings' authenticity -- and Julian Weissman, a former Knoedler salesman, claimed the works came from "secret" and "private" collections, with one supposedly owned by a Kuwaiti princess and another "acquired directly from Motherwell."

But the Dedalus Foundation, which was established by Motherwell before his death, says that the paintings all appear to be forgeries, with one board member calling them "laughable fakes."
It also says Freedman and Weissman may have sold phony paintings purportedly by other famous modern artists, including Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock.

The foundation charges that Freedman and Weissman got seven forged Motherwells from a Long Island woman, Glafira Rosales, whose "husband or partner," José Carlos Bergantinos Diaz, has "been accused publicly, as far back as 1999, of allegedly trafficking in forgeries."

Frank Maresca opens the door of his Manhattan loft and sticks his head into the front entrance in greeting. Behind him is the first glimpse of his collection — a painting for a 1931 poster by French artist Paul Colin that makes visitors do a double take when they look beyond their host. The image — hands in the act of putting on a pair of round black spectacles — looks as though it were modeled on Maresca and his signature eyeglasses.

Provocative and personal, it sums up Maresca’s feelings not only about art but also about the art of collecting. “Art’s all about having a strong reaction,” he says. “I don’t care if you have a negative or positive reaction; you can love it or you can hate it. I want you to have some kind of reaction because that’s the beginning of the discussion.”