Displaying items by tag: western art

It’s a collection that includes artworks by Andy Warhol, Claude Monet, Roy Lichtenstein, Jackson Pollock, Alberto Giacometti, Willem de Kooning, René Magritte, and many others. It has been valued at approximately $3 billion. And since the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran most of it has been in storage. That’s about to change.

The Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art is set to put on a stunning exhibition filled with Western works acquired by Iran’s former Empress Farah Diba Pahlavi, many of which have not been so boldly displayed since she and her late husband, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, were deposed in the revolution that severed relations between Iran and much of the West. Under the empress’s direction, Iran purchased the works at a time when the global art market was depressed and Iran’s coffers were full of oil revenue.

In 1872, painter Albert Bierstadt finished "View From Donner Lake, California," which encompassed the mile-high waters of the Sierra Nevada with the sinewy wagon trails and the muscular, ramrod-straight tracks of the newly built transcontinental railroad.

But a funny thing happened in a different Bierstadt painting finished a year later. In "Donner Lake From the Summit," a celebrated 10-foot-wide oil-on-canvas commissioned by Collis P. Huntington, the wagon trail practically disappears. The railroad tracks are barely there too, at first glance possibly mistaken for a fallen tree. The emphasis is all warm sun, fluffy clouds and glorious terrain, untouched by man.

Christie’s announces the sale Visions of the West: American Paintings from the William I. Koch Collection, which represents the breadth of Western Art with works spanning the 19th century to the present day. The dedicated sale will take place on May 21, at noon, following Christie’s Spring sale of American Art, and will feature more than 65 paintings from Mr. Koch’s superb collection. Highlights include the most important historic artists of the genre including Thomas Moran, Frederic Remington, Henry F. Farny, William Robinson Leigh, and Philip R. Goodwin, among others. The sale also features notable examples by many of the most important contemporary Western artists, including Howard Terpning, Martin Grelle, Tom Lovell and G. Harvey, among others. Representing a wide variety of Western subjects, the sale represents an excellent opportunity for new and established collectors alike.

There is something mysterious going on at Worcester Art Museum and one of the greatest painters in the history of the Western art is deeply involved.

It is a tale of two Madonnas, one by Raphael, the revered master of the High Renaissance, and the other by a mystery painter who aimed to imitate him and came pretty close. Washington's National Gallery of Art has loaned Raphael's "Small Cowper Madonna" to WAM, where it will be on view now through Sept. 27. Hanging next to the Raphael in a small gallery is the "Northbrook Madonna," a thematically and stylistically similar work that WAM has owned since the 1940s.

"Old Masters, New Voices" is a themed panel series hosted annually by the Old Master Paintings department at Sotheby’s, inviting contemporary scholars, artists, and specialists to take a new look at the influence of Old Master Paintings. This year’s panel, coinciding with Sotheby’s Master Week sales on January 29, will focus on the role played by food in the history of Western Art. From the sumptuous feasts so delicately reproduced in 17th century painting, to the use of food in 21st century performance art, the panel discussion will explore the ways in which artists have used food throughout history.

Christopher Apostle, Sotheby’s Senior Vice President and Head of Old Master Paintings Department and George Wachter, Sotheby’s Executive Vice President and Co-Chairman of Old Master Paintings Worldwide invite the public to join Old Masters, New Voices 2015 panel discussion, moderated by Michael Wilson, former Editor in Chief of La Cucina Italiana.

Giovanni Battista 'Titta' Lusieri was one of Italy's great landscape artists,  yet within a few years of his death he had faded into obscurity. Lusieri was a watercolorist in Rome at a time when the medium was rarely embraced by Italians – as a result, he was more popular in Britain than in his home country.

Lusieri was one of the pioneers of 'panoramania', the fetish for panoramic cityscapes that swept through Europe and America at the end of the 18th century. The Panoramic view of Rome and its accompanying views are Lusieri's earliest known works in the genre, representing a key moment in the development of tastes in Western art.

“Drei, zwei, eins!” With a rousing countdown in German, Stephanie Stebich, the executive director of the Tacoma Art Museum, led a group ribbon cutting Saturday morning that officially opened the museum’s new wing, showcasing art of the American West and doubling the museum’s gallery space.

Erivan Haub, the German grocery store magnate who donated his family’s Western art collection to TAM and paid for the new wing with a $20 million gift, beamed from a wheelchair pushed by his wife, Helga, during the celebration.

A Chinese movie tycoon dished out $61.8 million for a Vincent van Gogh painting at a Sotheby's New York auction this week, the highest auction price for a painting by the artist in over 15 years.

The 1890 "Still Life, Vase with Daisies, and Poppies," sold to Wang Zhongjun, one of China's richest men, fetched far more than the $30 million to $50 million estimate, and is said to be the highest price paid for Western art by a Chinese collector.

A Renaissance silver-gilt and enamel salt cellar, bequeathed by collector Michael Wellby to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, has been identified as Nazi loot. It will thus be returned to the descendants of its pre-WWII owner.

The intricate piece is one of the 500 silverware items—believed to be worth in excess of £10 million—donated to the museum in 2012 by Wellby, a former friend of Professor Timothy Wilson, the museum's Keeper of Western Art.

A measure of respect is due any artist who has the nerve to take on a revered masterpiece in the history of art, aspiring to remake it according to a conception of new conditions in the present. That's what Jim Hodges did in 2008 with a sculpture born of Albrecht Dürer's famous watercolor that shows a chunk of wet mud sprouting a clump of bristling weeds.

Arguably, Dürer's "The Great Piece of Turf" (1503) is the greatest drawing in all of Western art. Hodges' take on it, a delicate glass sculpture sealed inside a nearly 3-foot-tall bell jar, is one of 56 works in the 25-year retrospective of his career concluding its national tour at the UCLA Hammer Museum. "Jim Hodges: Give More Than You Take," jointly organized by the Dallas Museum of Art and Minneapolis' Walker Art Center, continues through Jan. 18.