Displaying items by tag: painting

An unknown Italian man identifying himself as a retired art thief has contacted the police in the northern city of Piacenza demanding €150,000 ($163,000) for the safe return of a Gustav Klimt painting.

According to Der Standard, the demand was made several days ago.

The artwork disappeared from the Galleria d'Arte Moderna Piacenza in February 1997 while the alarm system was incapacitated due to ongoing renovation work.

There’s more than $2.1 billion of art for sale at the New York auctions next month. Almost half of it, including an Andy Warhol painting belonging to billionaire Steven A. Cohen, already has a buyer before the first paddle goes up.

When the two-week sales start Nov. 4, $1 billion worth of paintings and sculptures are guaranteed to sell by Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Phillips at minimum prices regardless of what happens in the salesroom. The companies are lining up deep-pocketed backers for the guarantees or financing them with their own money -- a risky proposition because they can end up owning the works if there are no takers.

A plan to permanently secure a £35m painting by Rembrandt for the UK has been thwarted. The Portrait of Catrina Hooghsaet (1657), which has hung in Penrhyn Castle in north Wales for 150 years, will remain in the UK under the ownership of an overseas buyer, who this week withdrew their export licence application.

The Art Fund had quietly started a campaign to try to buy the Rembrandt and present it to a major public collection, probably the National Museum Wales in Cardiff.

A painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Fight Between Carnival and Lent (1559), is at the center of a dispute between Austria and Poland after claims arose that the artwork might be Nazi loot.

According to the Financial Times, documents that have surfaced in Krakow's National Museum claim that the Renaissance masterpiece, whose value is estimated at $77 million, was seized by Charlotte von Wächter, the wife of Krakow's Nazi governor Otto von Wächter, during the German occupation of Poland.

Orazio Gentileschi's Danaë (1621) will arrive at Sotheby's New York this January with an estimate of $25 to $35 million. The 17th-century painting provides a lens to reflect on just how far the Old Masters market has come in the past few decades.

The painting, which has an extensive exhibition history, including shows at the Getty, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Yale University, also has an interesting past in terms of provenance.

An untitled and undated artwork described as a “painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat that has been authenticated as original,” is up for sale next month in Nashville, Tenn.—and could bring upwards of $2 million.

It is being sold by Aberdeen, Miss.-based Stevens Auction Company, which has been in the business for 31 years.The auctioneer said it can trace the artwork’s ownership back decades.

Thornton Dial, the self-taught Alabama artist whose best-known work — dense, chaotic wall reliefs that exist somewhere between painting and sculpture — recently entered the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is moving into the Manhattan gallery ecosphere. Mr. Dial, 87, will be represented by the Marianne Boesky Gallery, whose roster includes artists like Frank Stella, the painter Barnaby Furnas and the director John Waters.

French police said on Saturday that a painting by the American neoexpressionist and street artist Jean-Michel Basquiat was stolen from the owner's Parisian apartment.

The painting by Basquiat, who was affiliated with the American avant-garde artist Andy Warhol, was estimated to be worth 10 million euros ($11.3 million).

According to French police, there were no signs of a break-in into the apartment where the painting was housed, suggesting that the thief's motive may stem from a family dispute.

Midway through “Treasures From the House of Alba: 500 Years of Art and Collecting,” you encounter Francisco de Goya’s mysterious full-length, life-size masterpiece “The Duchess of Alba in White” (1795). The official portrait of the duchess, she’s also the unofficial centerpiece of this stunning exhibition of more than 140 artworks. It’s like your hostess coming late to the party. You don’t mind because you’re already giddy—drunk on art—and she’s absolutely ravishing.

Forgotten for two decades, a dusty old canvas hidden in a corner of a small Dutch museum has been revealed as a painting by American artist James Whistler.

"Thanks to chemical analysis and an examination of its origins, we have concluded that we have an authentic Whistler," museum curator Jan Rudolph de Lorm told AFP.