Monthly archive
14 headlines
Source-linked reporting
artnews.com
Edward Hopper and Norman Rockwell works led Sotheby’s and Christie’s American art sales, totaling about $121 million with Hopper’s 1955 Hotel Window selling for $26.8 million. Christie’s sale brought $38.18 million, with records for Anna Mary Robertson Moses and Jacob Lawrence.
elpais.com
Joan Miró's Blue Star (1927) sold for 11.6 million euros at Drouot in Paris, a world record for a Miró at auction. The sale also included Picasso’s watercolor (6.2 million euros) and works by Juan Gris, Ferdinand Léger, and Henri Laurens; Gris’s El guitarrista (1918) sold for 2.17 million euros. The total auction totaled 21.8 million euros.
tucson.com
The article discusses Julius H. Schoeps, heir of Julius Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, suing the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and the Museum of Modern Art over five Picassos that were sent to Switzerland in 1933 as the heir contends they are now titles tied to his family; the case was filed in a Manhattan federal district court.
nytimes.com
The article discusses a lawsuit involving two Picasso paintings, Le Moulin de la Galette (1900) and Boy Leading a Horse, connected to the Mendelssohn-Bartholdy family and institutions including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and the Museum of Modern Art.
reuters.com
Damien Hirst donates four major works to the Tate Gallery, including a sliced and pickled cow and calf. The works include The Acquired Inability to Escape, Life Without You, Who is Afraid of the Dark? (2002), and a copy of Mother and Child Divided (2007). Tate director Nicholas Serota comments on the generosity and the gallery's budget constraints.
nytimes.com
Edward Wyatt reports that the Los Angeles County Museum of Art announced a promised gift of 130 modernist works, including 20 by Picasso, with works by Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky and sculptures by Alberto Giacometti. The gift is from Janice and Henri Lazarof and described by the museum as transformative, potentially adding major works from the Lazarof collection to Lacma’s holdings.
artforum.com
LACMA receives a donation of 130 works from Janice and Henri Lazarof, including twenty Pablo Picasso pieces from across sixty-five years, seven figurative sculptures, a painting by Alberto Giacometti, and two versions of Constantin Brancusi’s Bird in Space. The collection is valued by auction comparisons at over one hundred million dollars, and about eighty works will be displayed starting January 13 as part of a larger expansion project.
artforum.com
MoMA and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation filed a federal lawsuit in Manhattan to declaratorily own two Picasso paintings, Boy Leading a Horse (1906) and Le Moulin de la Galette (The Windmill at Galette) (1900), arguing they were never part of a forced sale; the paintings were donated to MoMA in 1964 by William S. Paley and to the Guggenheim in 1963 by Justin K. Thannhauser, while a claimant alleges they were sold under Nazi duress.
the-independent.com
The Independent reports that Christine Koenigs is pursuing a legal action against the Courtauld Institute of Art in London over three Rubens paintings. The case relates to artworks claimed to have been lost during World War II, amid a Spoliation Advisory Panel finding that they were lost for economic reasons. Related claims involve other families and artworks looted during the war, including works by Rembrandt, Jan Steen, Van Gogh, and Klimt, with figures such as Leonard Lauder and Georges Jorisch mentioned in broader context.
antiquesandthearts.com
The Rothschild Fabergé egg sold for $18.5 million to a private Russian bidder at Christie’s, establishing a new world record price for a Fabergé work of art and for a Russian object. The egg, gifted from Beatrice Ephrussi de Rothschild to Germaine Halphen on the occasion of Halphen’s engagement to Beatrice’s younger brother, Baron Edouard de Rothschild, remained in the family and is a clock-and-automaton piece with a diamond-set cockerel that performs hourly.
npr.org
Vincent van Gogh's painting The Ox-Cart (1884) was donated to the Portland Art Museum by Fred and Frances Sohn. The work had been in their family for more than 50 years. The Ox-Cart exists in two versions, with the second version in the Netherlands at the Kröller-Müller Museum.
doublebassblog.org
Phillip Serna performed Eduard Tubin’s Concerto for Double Bass and Orchestra with the Northwestern University Summer Orchestra under conductor Robert G. Hasty at Pick-Staiger Concert Hall, Evanston, IL. Phillip W. Serna is a double bass and viola da gamba player, with a biography detailing studies at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and Northwestern University.
violainvilnius.blogspot.com
The post is titled Viola in Vilnius: England - Land without Music? and discusses English music education, the Guardian article about Schmitz, the music manifesto, Classic FM and the London Philharmonic Society initiatives, and thoughts on British classical music and living composers.
theartnewspaper.com
The article reports that Eugenio Lopez Alonso’s Jumex Collection and Carlos Slim Helú’s Soumaya Museum are forming a cultural compound in Mexico City, with the Jumex project near the Soumaya Museum. It mentions Slim’s $50 billion fortune, the planned 2010 opening, and the involvement of architect Fernando Romero. Artists referenced include El Greco, Murillo, Zurbarán, Titian, Cranach, Brueghel the Younger, Hals, Van Dyck, Rubens, Rodin, and various Mexican and Spanish colonial works.