Displaying items by tag: alberto giacometti

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.

While world media was abuzz with the world-record breaking sale of Picasso’s "Les femmes d’Alger" for $179 million at Christie’s, another anonymous buyer took home the most expensive statue ever auctioned.

That anonymous buyer turned out to be hedge fund billionaire Steven Cohen, Page Six reports.

The National Portrait Gallery in London is to stage the first portrait show for an artist whose work ranks as some of the most recognizable of the 20th century.

Alberto Giacometti is well known for his tall and spindly sculptural figures. But he is far less well known as a portrait artist – a situation which the gallery hopes to redress with an exhibition opening in October.

According to Paul Moorhouse, curator of 20th century portraits at the NPG, the show has been five years in the planning. “Giacometti is one of the giants of 20th century art, one of the giants of modernism, but there is a great deal to be discovered about Giacometti,” he said on Tuesday.

A 67-year-old assessor named Wolf G., and a 60-year-old art dealer named Hans K., have been accused of art fraud and the falsification of documents, in a court case that has been brought against a German ring who stand accused of knowingly attempting to put a forged Alberto Giacometti sculpture on the market, Süddeutsche Zeitung has reported.

Wolf. G's ex-wife Ulrike G., a 63-year-old solicitor and her 92-year-old mother have been accused of being accomplices. Wolf.

For much of his life, the Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966) lived and worked out of a cramped and cluttered atelier in the 14th Arrondissement of Paris where paint-stained surfaces were covered with busts and figurines and walls were sketched and scrawled over. The artist toiled day and night in this spartan setting, pausing for meals with plaster still stuck in his hair.

That 270-square-foot studio will be recreated exactly as he left it as part of the new Institut Giacometti, a research center and exhibition space that will open to the public late next year in the same arrondissement, or district, according to Catherine Grenier, the director of the Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti.

ARTINFO has learned that the seller of “The Pointing Man,” the great Alberto Giacometti bronze sculpture that will be offered at Christie’s New York on May 11 with an estimate in the stratospheric region of $130 million, is the reclusive New York real estate magnate Sheldon Solow. According to a knowledgeable source, Solow acquired the hand-painted Giacometti bronze from the Sidney Janis Gallery in 1970.

Sidney Janis, a storied collector in his own right and a major benefactor to the Museum of Modern Art, had acquired it privately. The sculpture was exhibited and published in the second installment of the Sidney Janis Gallery 25th Anniversary exhibition and catalogue in October 1973 with the credit line, “Sheldon Solow Collection.”

In another sign of the market’s bubbling strength, Christie’s announced it will offer Alberto Giacometti’s life-size bronze “Pointing Man (L’Homme au Doigt)” from 1947 on May 11 in New York, along with an unpublished estimate in the record-breaking region of $130 million. Of the six works in the famed edition, as well as one artist proof, this example is believed to be the only one that is hand-painted by the artist. Five of the six in the edition are tucked away in museums or private foundations, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Tate Modern in London. Only two are left in private hands.

“Pointing Man,” standing 69 7/8 inches tall and bearing a crusty patina, as if charred by the horrific aftermath of the Second World War, reaches out with his spindly right arm, while his left remains raised at shoulder height, as a fencer might guardedly stand before an opponent.

Sotheby's New York announced it will offer the collection of Chicago philanthropist Jerome H. Stone over a series of auctions this spring. Stone assembled the collection over the course of the 1950s and '60s with the help of his wife Evelyn. It consists of blue chip works by artists such as Fernand Leger, Joan Miró, Alberto Giacometti, Juan Gris, and Marc Chagall, that together are expected to bring in more than $40 million.

Stone, who built his family business, Stone Container Corporation, into a national multi-billion dollar corporation, and later founded the International Alzheimer's Association, often bought from leading dealers including Pierre Matisse and Sidney Janis.

The Baltimore Museum of Art today announced it recently added René Magritte’s 1967 sculpture "Delusions of Grandeur" to its renowned collection of modern art. This monumental bronze was created by the Belgian artist during the last year of his life and there are very few casts. The work came to the BMA as a gift of National Trustee Sylvia de Cuevas and is the first sculpture by Magritte to enter the collection. It will be displayed, beginning this week, in a gallery with works by Magritte’s contemporaries: Max Ernst, Alberto Giacometti, André Masson, and Joan Miró.

“We are thrilled to welcome this remarkable sculpture into the BMA’s celebrated collection of modern art,” said BMA Director Doreen Bolger. “This imaginative artwork so well represents Magritte’s unique vision and is sure to become one of the most memorable artworks on view here.”

The exhibit — set to close on Wednesday at the center, 1871 N. High St. — will have attracted an estimated 120,000 people, Erik Pepple said, to see 60 masterpieces by Edgar Degas, Jean Dubuffet, Alberto Giacometti, Willem de Kooning, Pablo Picasso and Susan Rothenberg.

The works are from the private collection of Leslie and Abigail Wexner.