The article reports that the Valls family sold a portrait of Jovellanos painted by Francisco de Goya for 500 million pesetas in a five-party operation involving Hidroeléctrica del Cantábrico, the national government, the Government of Asturias, and the Museo de Bellas Artes de Asturias. The painting, Retrato de Jovellanos con el arenal de San Lorenzo al fondo, was painted between 1780 and 1783 and is now deposited with the Asturias museum after being recovered for the region. It will be exhibited at the Palacio de Velarde in Oviedo.
The Observer reports that S. I. Newhouse Jr. met with Steve Wynn and Larry Gagosian in Las Vegas to discuss the future of key Picasso artworks in Wynn's Mirage Resorts collection, including the 1942 Picasso Portrait of Dora Maar; the meeting occurred as Wynn prepared to resign from Mirage Resorts and amid the potential acquisition by MGM Grand Inc.
The Los Angeles Times reports that the Metropolitan Museum of Art has a list of 393 paintings from its European collection whose ownership during the Nazi era requires further authentication. The list includes works by Pablo Picasso, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Paul Cezanne, Henri Matisse and Rembrandt van Rijn. Lawrence Wheeler of the North Carolina Museum of Art described a recent restitution of a 16th-century Madonna and Child attributed to Lucas Cranach the Elder to a Viennese family.
Jesse Hamlin reports that the Bay Area has a growing, internationally recognized art-collecting community, with collectors ranging from local galleries to large private collections; notable figures include Don and Doris Fischer, Peter Haas, Mimi Haas, Charles Schwab, Helen Schwab, Richard Kramlich, Pamela Kramlich, Norman Stone, Norah Stone, Kent Logan, and Vicki Logan, whose families are connected to institutions like the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
The Independent reports that a Lucian Freud painting valued at £100,000 was destroyed when two porters at Sotheby’s Bond Street venue crushed it in a giant machine, after mistakenly believing it to be rubbish. A Sotheby’s spokesman said the owner would be compensated and steps have been taken to prevent recurrence; security cameras reportedly captured the incident.
Henri Matisse painting La Riviere aux Aloes (Brook With Aloes), dated 1907, owned by Alphonse Kann’s heirs, is being traced as part of Nazi-era looting; the work has been displayed at Houston’s Menil Collection since 1993 and was acquired in 1950 by John and Dominique de Menil. Kann’s heirs, led by Francis Warin, have pursued claims related to Kann’s collection seized in 1940 and have recovered other works including Picasso oils.