Displaying items by tag: record

As hundreds of tourists and Romans took pictures, water began flowing once again at Rome's famed Trevi fountain after a 17-month, 2.2 million euro ($2.4 million) restoration.

The restoration was paid for by the Rome-based Fendi fashion house. Rome's top culture official, Claudio Parisi, said at the fountain's re-opening Tuesday such public-private partnerships are essential to preserve the city's cultural treasures in tight economic times.

A drawing of hell previously attributed to a workshop assistant of Hieronymus Bosch has now been recognized as an authentic work by the master himself according to the experts conducting the Bosch Research and Conservation Project (BRCP) examining the artist's works worldwide.

The drawing has been hidden away in a private collection and will go on public display for the very first time as part of the major exhibition of works by Hieronymus Bosch at the Noordbrabants Museum in Den Bosch opening on February 13, 2016. Art historian and co-ordinator of the BRCP, Matthijs Ilsink, calls the drawing "an extraordinary find."

In its only North American presentation, The Age of Albrecht Dürer: German Drawings from the École des Beaux-Arts, Paris, has opened at the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento. The panoramic exhibition of German drawings is centered on Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528), considered one of the greatest and most influential artists of the Northern Renaissance and a pivotal figure of German humanism. This iconic artist's life is seen in an exceptional selection from one of the world's best drawings collections.

Buoyed by strong international tourism, a spate of well-attended shows and a seven-day-a-week schedule, the Metropolitan Museum of Art drew 6.3 million visitors in the last year, the most since it began tracking these statistics more than 40 years ago.

The Met, which announced the figures late Monday, said it was the fourth year in a row that the museum had drawn more than 6 million visitors, keeping it in a rarefied group that includes the National Gallery and the British Museum in London, which both attracted slightly larger numbers, and the Louvre, the world’s biggest draw with more than 9 million in each of the last three years.

Thirty-three-year-old Malaysian financier Jho Low, one of the art collectors who own property in the Time Warner Center—he owns a penthouse on the 76th floor, once owned by Jay Z and Beyonce, that he bought for $30.55— has been identified in an article in the "New York Times" as the buyer of Jean-Michel Basquiat's 1982 painting "Dustheads." The painting fetched $48.8 million in May 2013 at Christie's New York.

That purchase was part of a $495 million sale of postwar and contemporary art, which was, at the time, the highest total in auction history. Christie's has gone on to break that record three times with subsequent contemporary art auctions.

A new record price for an artwork, nearly $300 million, may have been achieved with the sale of a Paul Gauguin canvas by a Swiss collector. The buyer is rumored to be the Qatar Museums.

The seller, Rudolf Staechelin, a retired Sotheby's executive who now lives in Basel, confirmed the sale this afternoon to the "New York Times," but declined to identify the buyer or disclose the price. The 1892 oil painting, "Nafea Faa Ipoipo (When Will You Marry?)," is one of over 20 works in his collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art. Prior to the sale, the Gauguin canvas had been on loan to the Kunstmuseum in Basel for close to fifty years.

For the fifth consecutive year, Christie’s has beaten the annual art sales record, clocking up £5.1 billion ($8.4 billion dollars) of sales during 2014, which is up 12 percent on 2013. The figure includes private (as opposed to public) sales of £916 million, and online only sales of £21.4 million. But the majority was for good old-fashioned public auction sales (up 10 per cent to £4.2 billion).

Of the many categories of sale Christie’s holds, the largest by far is for post-war and contemporary art, the driving engine of the auction market. Sales in this category at Christie’s rose by 33 per cent last year to £1.7 billion ($2.8 billion), accounting for an extraordinary 40.5 per cent of public auction sales.

New York and London gallery Skarstedt is off to a roaring start at Frieze Masters 2014, counting among its early sales Andy Warhol’s 1984 remix of Edvard Munch’s "The Scream," which sold to a private collector for about $5.5 million.

That sum pales in comparison to the $119.9 million Leon Black paid for Munch’s own version of "The Scream" at Sotheby’s back in 2012, which set the record at the time for the most expensive artwork ever sold at auction.

A string of blockbuster shows at  London’s world-renowned museums helped to attract record numbers of tourists to the capital in the first half of this year, according to figures released today.

Tate Modern’s "Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs" exhibition pushed  the number of visits to the gallery to almost 700,000 in the first six months of 2014 — up from 425,000 for the same period last year.

Official figures released today put the capital on course for its most successful tourism year. International tourists made 8.459 million trips to London between January and July, a 7.6 per cent increase on 2013.

The art market is still crackling. Christie's International PLC said Tuesday it sold $4.5 billion of fine and decorative art during the first half of the year, up 22% from the same period a year ago—and representing a record high for the privately held company based in London. Christie's total included $3.6 billion in auction sales and $828 million in privately brokered art sales. Its private sales were up 16% compared with the first half of 2013.

Rival Sotheby's said it auctioned $3.3 billion in art during the first half, up 29.4% from the year before. The New York-based auctioneer will release consolidated totals next month.