Displaying items by tag: dealer

Jonathan Green, director of London's Richard Green Gallery, hit the proverbial dealer's jackpot when he unwittingly purchased three pastels by Claude Monet at a Parisian auction in 2014 for the price of two.

After returning home, Green noticed that there was something fastened to the back of one of the two rare studies of skies that he had bought for an undisclosed sum—it turned out to be another pastel which depicts a jetty and a lighthouse at Le Havre in Normandy, where the legendary artist grew up.

A French art dealer has been taken into custody after Picasso's step-daughter accused him of stealing some of the artist's works, a judicial source said Wednesday.

Catherine Hutin-Blay, the daughter of Pablo Picasso's second wife Jacqueline Roque, filed a complaint against art dealer Olivier Thomas in March after noticing some of her paintings were on the market, the source said, confirming a report in British daily "The Telegraph."

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.

The University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive has acquired the Steven Leiber collection of Conceptual art and ephemera as well as Leiber’s library of Conceptual art reference and artists’ books. Steven Leiber, who was a world-renowned dealer, scholar, and collector with a special interest in Conceptual art, died in 2012.

In recognition of Leiber’s impact on the history of art and on the museum’s own collection, BAM/PFA will name the area of its new building that will house these works “The Steven Leiber Conceptual Art Study Center.” BAM/PFA’s new building, designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, is currently under construction in downtown Berkeley and is slated to open in early 2016. With this new acquisition, BAM/PFA is poised to become one of the world’s leading centers for the study of Conceptual art.

Guy Bennett, a former auction house expert and dealer based in London has been tapped by Qatar Museums (formerly Qatar Museums Authority). According to Carol Vogel in the "New York Times," Qatar Museums announced this week that Bennett will become the institution's director of collections and acquisitions. A 13-year veteran of Christie's auction house, specializing in 20th-century art, Bennett left the company in 2009. Later that year, he formed Pelham Holdings, an art advisory firm.

Following a seven-year legal battle over a Sandro Botticelli painting "Madonna and Child" (1485) that was caught up in the collapse and ensuing bankruptcy proceedings of Salander-O'Reilly Galleries, rulings by two New York judges last month have resulted in the painting—worth an estimated $10 million—being returned to its rightful owner, Panama-based Kraken Investments. Ronald Fuhrer, a Tel Aviv-based dealer and advisor to Kraken, confirmed to artnet News that he had retrieved the painting on behalf of the investment firm on December 8. At various times, it looked as though the painting would be classified for legal purposes as gallery collateral and thus one of the assets that should be sold to repay creditors, despite the owners insistence that it had merely been loaned for a show.

Just in time for Thanksgiving, Seth Kaller, one of the world’s leading dealers in rare historic documents, will exhibit and offer for sale George Washington’s Thanksgiving Proclamation in conjunction with Leigh Keno, President of Keno Auctions, now through November 26.

The Thanksgiving Proclamation is priced at $8.4 million, and is the only example in private hands. The only other Washington-signed copy was acquired by the Library of Congress in 1921. The document was offered at Christie’s on November 14, 2013, where it was expected to sell for upwards of $12,000,000. Kaller represents the document’s owner, who has decided to offer the manuscript through exhibition and private sale.

Christie’s announced it has been entrusted with the sale of the Collection of Robert Hatfield Ellsworth, the distinguished American scholar, dealer and collector of Asian Art who passed away in August 2014. Widely recognized throughout Asia and the Americas for his ground-breaking role in the study and appreciation of Asian Art, Mr. Ellsworth was a distinguished connoisseur who opened new arenas of collecting to Western audiences and built a successful business purveying the very finest works of art to his generation’s foremost collectors. His personal collection of over 2,000 items was assembled over a lifetime and widely recognized as the most important grouping of Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Himalayan and Southeast Asian sculpture, paintings, furniture and works of art. To celebrate this exceptional collection and the generous and benevolent man behind it, Christie's is organizing free public exhibitions and a special five-day series of auctions and online-only sales to be held during Asian Art Week at Christie's New York in March 2015. A global tour of highlights from the collection kicks off November 21 in Hong Kong, and will continue to stops throughout Asia and Europe prior to the New York sales.

The expansive collection of Russia's Hermitage Museum just got a little bit bigger: Helen Drutt English, the pioneering collector and dealer of American modern and contemporary craft, known in the art world as Helen Drutt, has donated to the Hermitage a collection of 74 works, including ceramics, furniture and jewelry, worth approximately $2 million, reports the "Moscow Times."

The gift coincides with the St. Petersburg institution's 250th anniversary, and is intended to help foster the relationship between Russia and the US.

An anonymous caller has cracked open an organized crime syndicate that stole up to 302 works of art from Turkey's State Art and Sculpture Museum, located in the capital, Ankara. According to a report in the "Hurriyet" Turkish newspaper, three individuals from the group have been arrested thus far. Fifteen remain on the run.

The arrests came courtesy of an anonymous phone call to the Turkish culture minister Ertuğrul Günay. The witness, said to be an antiques dealer himself and referred to by the pseudonym "Daylight," has revealed extensive details about the operation.