Displaying items by tag: limestone

The woman, carved from limestone, sits with her arms resting on her pulled-up legs and looks enigmatically ahead. She is regarded as one of Romania’s finest modernist artworks, yet the Bucharest government’s refusal to say whether it wants to buy her has left the €20m (£15m) sculpture in a murky legal limbo, and its owners unable to sell.

The statue, "The Wisdom of the Earth" by Constantin Brâncuși, has a history that reflects the tumult in its creator’s native land. First sold in 1911, it was confiscated by the communists in 1957 and became the subject of a lengthy legal battle after the fall of the dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu, ending in 2008 with it returned to the family of its original owner.

The Dahesh Museum of Art today announced that it has selected a townhouse at 178 East 64^th Street as its new headquarters and exhibition space.  This coincides with the 20^th Anniversary of the Dahesh, America's only institution dedicated to collecting and exhibiting European and American academic art of the 19^th and 20^th centuries.  The five-story townhouse has been selected for its convenient location and spacious gallery-like parlor.  The Dahesh is currently consulting with architects, with an opening date to be announced later this year.

The new home for the Dahesh Museum was built in 1899 and has a limestone and brownstone facade.  The building is 20-feet wide, comprising of approximately 7,000 square feet of space. Original details include two fireplaces with imported French Louis XV marble mantles and a marble foyer. The new location also includes a beautiful finished outdoor space of Italian stone.

Between wooded ravines north-east of downtown Toronto in Canada, a cone jutting upwards from beige limestone shares a seven-hectare site with a massive rectangle in elegant white granite that resembles an open box. Both structures form a bridge between the tradition and culture of the Islamic world and the present and future of Canada.

The Aga Khan Museum, the 4,370-square-metre chiselled white form, opened to the public on Thursday. Clad in Brazilian granite, it houses the collection of the Aga Khan, the imam of the Ismaili community, in a structure designed by the Japanese architect Fumihiko Maki.

The Northampton Museum and Art Gallery and the Abington Park Museum are both being excluded from the UK’s Accreditation Scheme for museums by the Arts Council, reports the BBC. The decision to sanction the museums comes after the Northampton Borough Council, which runs both institutions, sold the Sekhemka limestone statue, an ancient Egyptian artifact, at Christie’s last month.

As reported by artnet News, the local community opposed the sale of the 4,000-year-old statue, organizing to form the Save Sekhemka Action Group. They have since dubbed the auction day “the darkest cultural day in [Northampton's] history.” The auction was also condemned by Egyptian ambassador Ahsraf Elkholy, who called it “an abuse to the Egyptian archaeology.”

Christie's evening auction of classical decorative arts  has realised £31,048,500/ $53,186,081/€38,934,819, marking the highest total for any and breaking the previous record established by Christie’s Exceptional Sale in 2011 at £28.7million.

The top price was paid for a controversial Egyptian statue of Sekhemka, made of painted limestone. The statue dating to the Old Kingdom, Late Dynasty 5, circa 2400–2300 B.C. was probably from Saqqara in Lower Egypt. It realised a staggering £15,762,500/ $27,001,163/€19,766,175 (estimate: £4,000,000- £6,000,000). This has set a world record price at auction for an ancient Egyptian work of art. The piece was sold off from a regional English Museum and was “originally acquired by the 2nd Marquess of Northampton during his travels in Egypt in 1849-50. It was given to the Northampton Museum either by the 3rd or 4th Marquess of Northampton prior to 1880.