Displaying items by tag: heir

The auction of Rachel “Bunny” Lambert Mellon’s estate, which offered collectibles from a $39.9 million Mark Rothko painting to a rabbit-shaped doorstop for more than $5,000, fetched $218.1 million at Sotheby’s (BID) in New York.

The 1,521 objects including fine art, furnishings and jewelry owned by Mellon, who died in March at the age of 103, were offered in three sales over five days that ended yesterday. Ninety-eight percent of the lots sold.

Collectors sought a piece of the history of the American socialite, who was married to the late banking heir Paul Mellon. Sotheby’s said more than 5,000 visitors came to see the collection in one week at its New York headquarters.

The Swiss art gallery named as the sole heir of reclusive German art collector Cornelius Gurlitt is to accept his bequest of masterpieces which include works looted by the Nazis from Jews, a Swiss paper reported on Sunday.

Gurlitt, who died in May aged 81, had secretly stored hundreds of works by the likes of Chagall and Picasso at his Munich apartment and a house in nearby Salzburg, Austria.

The collection, worth an estimated 1 billion euros (0.78 billion pounds), contains an as yet undetermined number of works taken by the Nazis from their Jewish owners during World War Two.

The recently released movie "The Monuments Men" tells of Hitler's attempt to steal or destroy Europe's greatest works of art, and the men FDR sent into harm's way to stop him. Thousands of works of art and many masterpieces were recovered and returned to their rightful owners. Yet today, seven decades after the fall of the Third Reich, other stolen works of art—some from owners who perished in the Holocaust—hang in museums in Europe and in America.

In the U.S., for instance, the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, Calif., is fighting a claim by Marei von Saher, heir of Jewish Dutch art dealer Jacques Goudstikker, whose collection was forcibly sold to the Nazis in 1940. The works in question are 16th-century oil paintings by Lucas Cranach. The museum has denied Ms. von Saher's claim on grounds that the statute of limitations on looted art has run out.

The Swiss museum designated as the sole heir of German collector Cornelius Gurlitt’s trove of priceless art says it plans to vet the collection first before deciding whether to accept it.

Gurlitt died last month, two years after German authorities seized more than 1,000 artworks from his Munich apartment. Some of the items — including works by Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and Marc Chagall — may have been looted from Jewish owners under Nazi rule.

The Kunstmuseum Bern said in a statement Tuesday it hasn’t yet been able to inspect the works or received an inventory.

Marc Chagall’s (1887-1985) Le Nu au Bouquet, which was stolen in 2002 from a yacht moored in Italy, has been recovered in a private collector’s home. The robbery occurred while the boat, which came from the United States, was being repaired in northern Italy’s port of Savona. The thieves replaced the painting with a forgery.

Following the death of the yacht owner, his heir traveled to Italy to recover the boat and its contents, ultimately discovering that the Chagall painting had been replaced by a fake. The heir alerted the Italian police, but news about the painting didn’t surface until 2012 during an investigation into Bologna’s stolen art trade. Investigators were able to trace Le Nu au Bouquet to an art collector from Turin who had purchased the work, which came with an official authentication, in 2003.

Italy’s art theft division is currently investigating three suspects – two Romanians who were working on the yacht at the time of the theft and a gallery owner from Bologna. The Chagall painting is believed to be worth in excess of $1.3 million.

Seven works by the renowned Italian painter Piero della Francesca (1411/13-1492) are currently on view at the Frick Collection in New York. Piero della Francesca in America is the first monographic exhibition in the United States to focus on Piero, one of the founding figures of the Italian Renaissance.

Among the seven works on view at the Frick are six panels from the Sant’Agostino altarpiece (1454-69), a work commissioned for the Church of St. Agostino in Piero’s native Borgo San Sepolcro. Soon after the altarpiece was completed, it was dismantled, removed from the church, and the panels dispersed. Eight panels survive to this day including the four belonging to the Frick, three more, which are housed in European museums, and another belonging to the National Gallery in Washington, D.C.

The Frick’s reunion of the six panels is the largest reassembly from Piero’s masterpiece ever to appear on display. The panels are accompanied by the Virgin and Child Enthroned with Four Angels (circa 1460-70), the only intact altarpiece by Piero in the United States. Acquired by Sterling Clark (1877-1956), the heir to the Singer Sewing Machine fortune and an avid art collector in 1913, the work is now part of the Sterling and Francine Clark Institute’s collection in Williamstown, MA.  

The exhibition, which is on view in the Frick’s oval room, is accompanied by a number of lectures, gallery talks, and seminars. Piero della Francesca in America will be on view through May 19, 2013.

A remarkable collection of Italian Baroque paintings worth $155 million has been donated to galleries and museums across the UK. The works were previously part of the private collection of Sir Denis Mahon, a philanthropist and heir to the Guinness Mahon banking fortune who died in 2011 at the age of 100. Mahon, who began collecting in the 1930s, was an avid believer that admission to public museums should be free of charge. In keeping with his wishes, Mahon’s generous gift will be revoked if any institution charges the public to see them.

The Art Fund charity, which oversaw the exchange, announced that the transfer of 57 Italian Baroque paintings has been completed. The National Gallery has received 25 works; 12 paintings went to the Ashmolean in Oxford; 8 pieces are now in the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh; 6 works went to the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge; the Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery received 5 paintings; and one work was given to the Temple Newsam House in Leeds. The gift included works by Guercino (1591-1666), Guido Reni (1575-1642), Domenichino (1581-1641), and Ludovico Carracci (1555-1619).

In addition to the sizable donation, Mahon left $1.5 million to the Art Fund and 50 works associated with Guercino to the Ashmolean.  

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.