Previous Posts: April 2011
Leonardo loan to London still at risk?
April 13 2011
In Poland, some conservation experts are still advising against letting Leonardo's Lady with an Ermine travel to London for the National Gallery's Leonardo exhibition. They believe it is too fragile to be moved. They don't seem to be bothered about the flimsy case they carry it about it, however.
A final decision on whether it can also travel to Berlin and Madrid is expected soon.
Extremely rare object offered by Christie's
April 13 2011
It's a job! Not many of these in the art world at the moment. If you're fluent in another language, and interested in Old Masters, there's a vacancy in Christie's OMP department in King St - one of the best places to work in the art market. Closes 15th April.
Mid-season sales
April 12 2011
There are some nice things in this week's mid-season sales at Sotheby's and Christie's, but nothing as exciting as the forthcoming £20m Stubbs at Christie's main sale in July.
Sotheby's sale offers more evidence that the aristocratic sell-off continues apace, with part of the collection of the family of the Marquess of Ailesbury/Earls of Cardigan. The ancestral portraits on offer are of varying quality, however, and it always makes me sad to see centuries of collecting dispersed all at once for not much gain. [More below]
Stolen antiquities returned
April 12 2011
Four of the exhibits stolen from the Egyptian Museum in Cairo during the revolution have been returned. Three are in ok condition, one has been broken into 11 pieces.
Exhibitions in the recession
April 12 2011
There's an interesting piece by Robin Pogrebin in the New York Times about the impact of the recession on loan exhibitions in the US. Last year's Picasso exhibition at the Met was made up exclusively with Met-owned works.
...many museum directors are finding virtue in necessity. Shows built largely from in-house collections have drawn well, they say, and curators are introducing the public to unsung treasures.
“If the recession has compelled us as museums in this country to focus even more intensely than we have in the past on our collections, that’s a good thing,” said Glenn D. Lowry, the director of the Museum of Modern Art. “Because they’re our primary responsibility.”
Ex Met director, Philippe de Montebello, demurs:
“No collection, no matter how large and rich the museum, is ever deep enough and rich enough in any single area that it can be explored in depth...”
Is part of the problem the prohibitive expense that has built up around loans? I remember an exhibition here at the gallery in 2007, which included a number of museum loans. One item had to be flown business class with a curator (who needed to be put up in a pricey hotel) - while another arrived in the handbag of someone who came on the tube. The latter object was far more valuable, and to be honest had travelled far more safely too.
Miro's Pubes
April 12 2011
Picture: Fondacio Joan Miro
If, like me, you're looking forward to the new Miro exhibition at Tate Modern (opens 14th April), then can I suggest you don't read the press reviews until after you've been? Since most of them adhere to the Guff Rule - the less paint on a canvas, the more guff a critic invents to describe it - you'll be robbed of the open mind necessary to appreciate Miro when you finally see the works yourselves. Check out Adrian Searle in The Guardian, describing Painting on White Background for the Cell of a Recluse, above:
There's nothing much to the three white canvases. No colour, no forms. Each enormous canvas is painted with a single black line over an unevenly primed white ground. You can tell where the slender brush has run out of paint, is recharged, then continues on its way with the same unknowable purpose, like the passage of an ant or a bird in flight, or the journey the eye makes along a horizon. Or like a long hair lost in the bedsheets, a memory of something or someone.
The attribution from hell?
April 11 2011
Picture: Sotheby's
Sotheby's must have been presented with a real puzzle when it came to cataloguing the above portrait for this week's old master sale, and I'm impressed by their solution. [More below]
$79 million expansion at Speed Art Museum
April 11 2011
More evidence that it isn't all doom and gloom in the museum world; the Speed Art Museum in Kentucky is forging ahead with its mega-expansion.
More deaccessioning
April 11 2011
The headlines today are that Bolton Council has decided not to sell a work by local artist Alfred Heaton Cooper (above). But they will press ahead with the sale of 36 other works deemed irrelevant to their 'core collection'. These will be offered at Bonhams over the next few months. The list includes:
- Gaspard Dughet Classical Landscape
- Richard Ansdell Buzzard and Ptarmigan
- William Powell Frith A Dream of the Future
- 18th Century French School The Finding of Oedipus
- Arthur Ambrose McEvoy Madame Errasuriz
- Walter Richard Sickert Pauline de Talleyrand-Perigord
- Philip Wilson Steer The Falls at Aysgarth
- John Everett Millais The Somnambulis
- George Romney King Lear
- Edward Burne-Jones Danae and the Brazen Tower
- Charles Ginner English Landscape
Yet more optimism
April 8 2011
From the BBC news website:
A cobweb-covered painting found behind an old bureau in a Northamptonshire farmhouse could sell for a six-figure sum, an auctioneer has said. The picture of a French village is believed to be by Maurice Utrillo, an early 20th Century post-impressionist painter. Last December an auction of his work in Paris raised over $7m (£4.3m). ...
"We are attributing the painting to him. We have put it in with a conservative estimate of £2,000 to £3,000 but it is caveat emptor, buyer beware," he [auctioneer J P Humbert] added.
I'd be very beware. To see some Utrillos vraiment, cliquez ici.
Peering beneath the Frick's Bellini
April 8 2011
A complete image of the underdrawing in the Frick Collection's St Francis in the Desert by Giovanni Bellini has been captured for the first time, after the picture was subjected to exhaustive technical analysis by the Metropolitan Museum. See the full fascinating results in the video above, with more images and text here.
Women war artists at the IWM
April 8 2011
Human Laundry, Belsen, 1945, by Doris Zinkeisen. Picture: Imperial War Museum
A new exhibition of paintings and drawings by women war artists opens tomorrow (until 8th Jan 2012) at the Imperial War Museum. A selection of images and more details here, buy the catalogue here.
Canaletto restauriert
April 7 2011
Picture: dapd
That's German (I think) for 'Canaletto restored'. Canaletto's epic view of Dresden has been at the cleaners since 2009, and will go back on public display at the Albertinum in Dresden on 25th August. More here (in deutsch).
Gemaldegalerie restitutes Vogelstein portrait
April 7 2011
The indefatigable staff at the Commission for Looted Art in Europe have succesfully brokered the return of Carl Christian Vogel von Vogelstein's Portrait of a Young Woman Drawing to the heirs of an Austrian Jewish family. The painting was stolen by the Nazis from the Rosauer sisters of Vienna in 1938, and entered Hitler's Linz collection in 1941. After the war the painting was held by the Dresden Gemaldegalerie. Two of the Rosauer sisters, Bertha and Jenny, were murdered in Treblink in 1942. They were in their late 70s.
This is the second Rosauer painting that the Commission has restituted - Portrait of a Young Woman in White by Johann Baptist Lampi the Elder was returned in 2010. Full details here.
Sir Charles Eastlake exhibition at the National Gallery
April 6 2011
A new exhibition at the National Gallery will celebrate the life and achievements of its first director, Sir Charles Eastlake. Art for the Nation (27th July - 30th October) will exhibit some of the works he acquired for the gallery, and the notebooks from his acquisition trips to Italy. Eastlake was also an artist, who was elected President of the Royal Academy in 1850. More on him here.
'Boffins in Dig for Mona Lisa Body'
April 6 2011
That's The Sun's take on a group of researchers in Italy who are excavating remains that may be those of the Mona Lisa, Lisa Gherardini. They want to take samples of her DNA, and then recreate her face to see if it matches the Mona Lisa.
The Daily Mail, meanwhile, reports that the dig may be a waste of time:
..there are fears that the project will be unsuccessful as locals have told the team that 30 years ago the remains of the convent were bulldozed into a rubbish dump.
I'm afraid I'm deeply suspicious of facial reconstructions from skulls - they always look like rejects from Madame Tussaud's, c.1795.
Art History Futures
April 6 2011
A triptych by Zhang Xiaogang has sold for $9.8m in Hong Kong, setting a record price for a Chinese contemporary work of art.
If anyone thinks this is a high water mark for Chinese contemporary art, think again. It's probably just the beginning...
Stubbs to break £20m barrier?
April 6 2011
Auction news from Christie's this morning; George Stubbs' masterpiece Gimcrack on Newmarket Heath, with a Trainer, Stable-Lad and a Jockey (1765) will be offered for sale on 5th July, with a lower estimate of £20m. This follows Sotheby's sale of Stubbs' Brood Mare and Foals in December 2010 for just over £10m, which set a new auction record for the artist by some margin.
Both prices suggest that Whistlejacket, bought by the National Gallery in 1998 for £15.75m, was a bit of a bargain.
Only paintings by Turner, Pontormo, Rubens and Rembrandt have previously made more than £20m at auction.
Happy Birthday, Mr President
April 5 2011
A painting by Gerrit van Honthorst that belonged to James Madison has been restored in time to hang back in its original place in his home, Montpelier, in time for the 4th President's 260th birthday. More here.
Manet at the Musee D'Orsay
April 5 2011
Manet - the Man who Invented Modern Art, opened today at the Musee D'Orsay in Paris. 140 works, including 84 paintings, closes July 3rd. Richard Dorment gives it 4 stars, and even a video.
Worth jumping on the Eurostar.
