Displaying items by tag: provenance

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.

The Art Newspaper has discovered that the largest and most powerful due diligence service used by the art world is at the center of three separate provenance disputes, two of which are working their way through international courts.

The Art Loss Register (ALR), a company founded by Julian Radcliffe that works with law enforcement officials worldwide, more than 80 auction houses, most major art fairs and innumerable collectors and dealers, has provided certificates confirming that works of art were free from claim, when they were in fact subject to claims by third parties or stolen.

A portrait of Rubens’ young daughter Clara Serena, recently deaccessioned by New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, is going on display at the Rubenshuis in Antwerp. In 2013, it was auctioned as by a “follower of Rubens”, with an estimate of $20,000-$30,000. Now upgraded as authentic, it will hang in the artist’s own house, in the exhibition “Rubens in Private: the Master Portrays his Family” (March 28-June 28).

The earliest certain provenance of the portrait goes back to a New York collector in the 1930s and it was considered authentic until the American specialist Julius Held downgraded it in 1959.

On March 17, Christie’s hosted its first-ever evening sale dedicated to Asian art in New York. The occasion was the first offering from the prized Robert Hatfield Ellsworth Collection, regarded as the most prestigious — not to mention largest — private collection of Asian art to hit the auction block. Thanks to the freshness of the material and the pedigreed provenance, the house had no trouble securing buyers for all 57 lots, and with a whopping $61,107,500, total, the results demonstrated strength across all areas of the market for Indian, Himalayan, Southeast Asian, Chinese, and Japanese art.

The sale began promptly at 6 p.m., with fierce participation from telephone bidders and individuals in the room for a superb gilt-bronze figure of a seated bear from China’s Western Han Dynasty (206 BC).

Since the mid-nineteenth century, Renaissance Italian bronze statuettes, maiolica wares, Limoges enamels, and French sixteenth-century ceramics belonged to the category of objects that every serious art collector in Europe hoped to own, their value and association with royal and noble provenance bestowing upon their owners an aura of cultivation and taste. The greatest collections were assembled by Sir Richard Wallace, George Salting, Frederic Spitzer, and several members of the Rothschild family, among others. Henry Clay Frick, who emulated these European collectors, acquired in 1915 most of John Pierpont Morgan’s renowned collection of Italian bronzes and Limoges enamels. Three years later, he completed his Renaissance collection of sculpture and decorative arts with the acquisition of a Saint-Porchaire ewer, shown at right, related to a small group of elaborate French sixteenth-century ceramics. Only about seventy authentic pieces of Saint-Porchaire are known today, making them exceedingly rare. In March, with the generous support of Trustee Sidney R. Knafel, the Frick purchased an unusual Saint-Porchaire ewer decorated with a lizard spout and a handle in the shape of a bearded man.

A museum rarely publicizes its doubts about rights to works in its collection—but that’s what Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum is doing in an exhibition that opens Friday.

“The Stedelijk Museum in the Second World War” recounts the daring ways in which the museum’s employees fought Nazi censors after Germany conquered the Netherlands in May 1940. But the show also features 16 works in the permanent collection by artists including Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky and Henri Matisse that the museum says it might not rightfully own.

The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston is receiving a major gift of 186 works seized by Nazi forces in 1938.

It’s taken decades for the donor’s family to recover the famed collection that includes fine jewelry, rare books and paintings. The objects have taken a fascinating journey between Vienna and Boston.

One of the confiscated works is a Dutch painting of a man on a horse titled, “A Dordrecht nobleman on horseback with retainers and grooms.” But instead of focusing on the front of the canvas, MFA curator of provenance Victoria Reed points to numbers and letters on the back. They’ve been drawn, etched and stamped onto the painting’s wooden stretcher.

A long-standing restitution dispute between Germany's Kunstsammlung NRW and the heirs of the Jewish art dealer Alfred Flechtheim, regarding the provenance of Juan Gris work, "Die Welt" reports. The museum has called on the panel of experts from the so-called Limbach Commission to adjudicate the ongoing issue. The commission's rulings will be officially non-binding, but can hold significant sway in deciding restitution cases. The museum has asked the help of the panel of experts from the Limbach Commission to adjudicate the case.

The Kunstsammlung NRW claims that after years of provenance research it has not any found evidence to support beyond a reasonable doubt that Juan Gris's work "Guitar and Ink Bottle on a Table" (1913) belonged to the Jewish art dealer.

The Harvard Art Museums at 32 Quincy St. announced the launch of their redesigned and expanded website. The website, www.harvardartmuseums.org, provides an enhanced digital platform, increasing access to the museums’ collections of approximately 250,000 objects.

Works from the collections of the Harvard Art Museums, comprising the Fogg, Busch-Reisinger and Arthur M. Sackler Museums, feature prominently throughout the site, and each of the approximately 250,000 objects also has an individual page with details about its exhibition history, provenance and conservation. Object images are a key component; users can examine works using the site’s improved scrolling and zoom functionality. In many cases, multiple photos are available of the same object at various stages in its history, offering insight into conservation and condition over time.

One of Georgia O’Keeffe’s iconic flower paintings has shattered the auction record for a work by a female artist. On Thursday, November 20, “Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1” (1932), a commanding painting with an impressive provenance, sold for $44.4 million during Sotheby’s American Art sale in New York. The work, which belonged to the artist’s sister, Anita O’Keeffe Young, and hung in the White House’s private dining room during the George W. Bush administration, was offered for sale by the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. The Santa Fe-based institution sold the painting, along with two other works by O’Keeffe, to benefit its Acquisitions Fund.

Seven bidders competed for “Jimson Weed,” driving the price to a record height and nearly tripling the work’s high estimate of $15 million.