Displaying items by tag: Paintings

A new scandal has rocked the art world, the likes of which have not been seen since the "early Vermeer" scandal of the 1940s. Sotheby’s was recently forced to take back an £8.4 million ‘Frans Hals,’ because it was revealed to be a fake. The paintings in question are Old Masters, said to be by Frans Hals, Lucas Cranach, and others. Few major art figures are willing to speak openly because the scandal is a matter of such embarrassment, but one well-known dealer has described the individual behind the forgeries as the “Moriarty of fakers” because they are so brilliantly constructed.

During the culturally repressive late-16th and 17th centuries, Spanish kings often secreted away their nude paintings in rooms known as “salas reservadas,” where they could enjoy them in private.

Eventually, these works made it out into the open and, in 1830, into a gallery at the Prado Museum in Madrid, where they remain among the finest of that institution’s holdings.

There are allegations of forgeries on display at the Chicago Art Institute one of the city's most popular attractions and one of the top museums in the world.

This illusion of reality involves the Chicago exhibition of legendary artist Edgar Degas. His paintings are on display right now at the Art Institute along with the famous 19th century artist's bronze sculptures.

One of the first museums created for the enjoyment of the middle class was the Shakespeare Gallery, opened in 1789 by John Boydell. Each of its paintings depicted a different scene from a Shakespeare play, and the museum even had a shop on its lower level for purchasing souvenir prints. It closed in 1805, its collection of paintings dispersed through an auction, and its building at 52 Pall Mall was torn down in 1870.

Within the Museum of Modern Art’s announcement on Tuesday of coming exhibitions were signs of a seismic shift underway in how it collects and displays modern and contemporary art — changes that are expected to have a powerful impact on the museum’s renovation.

While curatorial activities used to be highly segregated by department, with paintings and sculpture considered the most important, the museum has gradually been upending that traditional hierarchy, organizing exhibitions in a more fluid fashion across disciplinary lines and redefining its practice of showing art from a linear historical perspective.

A trove of Dutch Golden Age art stolen from a provincial Dutch museum nearly 11 years ago has been linked to a volunteer nationalist militia in Ukraine, the museum announced Monday.

The Westfries Museum in the northern town of Hoorn went public with claims that the 24 paintings snatched in a burglary on Jan. 9, 2005, along with 70 pieces of silverware are now being offered for sale in Ukraine, saying it wants to deter potential buyers.

With a trial looming, the Knoedler Gallery, its former director Ann Freedman, and Knoedler’s owner 8-31 Holdings have reached a settlement with the New York collector John Howard. Howard had bought a fake work by Willem de Kooning from the gallery for $4m. The lawsuit arose from Knoedler’s selling some $60m of fake Abstract Expressionist art in a scandal that sent shivers through the art world when it broke in late 2011.

Next week, The Lock, one of John Constable’s most famous compositions will reappear on the market for the first time in 160 years. The monumental landscape - depicting the countryside of the painter’s “careless boyhood” - will lead Sotheby’s London Evening auction of Old Master & British Paintings on 9th December. The sale will be further distinguished by museum-quality works, an unusually large number of which are from private collections and come to the market for the first time in several generations.

The long-awaited art exhibition Spanish Masters from the Hermitage. The World of El Greco, Ribera, Zurbarán, Velázquez, Murillo & Goya opened at the Hermitage Amsterdam on Saturday 28 November 2015. The exhibition includes more than sixty superior paintings and a rich collection of graphic works and applied arts masterpieces. Never before has the Netherlands hosted such a comprehensive survey of Spanish art, with work that is hardly represented in Dutch museum collections.

The Philippine government will launch a website to crowd-source tips on the whereabouts of some 200 missing art works, including paintings by Van Gogh, Picasso, and Rembrandt that were owned by former first lady Imelda Marcos, an official said Friday.

The family of late dictator Ferdinand Marcos allegedly amassed billions of dollars' worth of ill-gotten wealth.