Previous Posts: articles 2018

Christie’s International held its smallest New York evening Impressionist and modern art sale in 2 1/2 years, at the outset of an auction fortnight expected to total as much as $1.5 billion.

Last night’s sale tallied $117.1 million, in the middle of the presale range of $90.5 million to $130.2 million. Three of the 31 lots failed to sell in an auction of less than an hour, the quickest in years.

Two paintings tied for top lot, at $19.1 million: Paul Cezanne’s watercolor “Joueur de Cartes” (“Card Player”) and a lush flower bouquet painted by Henri Matisse in 1907, “Les Pivoines.”

Christie’s equivalent auction in November had 82 lots and tallied $140.8 million.

“We all know it’s very difficult to get great Impressionist and modern work,” said New York art dealer Asher Edelman. “The contemporary options are much better.”

So how can you be sure the auction houses are intercepting any dodgy Dalís before they make it onto the rostrum? Only last year, a former art teacher, Rizvan Rahman, was jailed for 18 months for selling UK galleries some £180,000 worth of fakes, including a £35,000 Lowry lookalike.

Naturally, there’s a fair amount of caveat emptor when you’re buying at an auction. None the less, the experienced London art-verifier Bendor Grosvenor says auction houses are keen to avoid a stain on their good name. “If it turns out there’s any kind of justification for questioning a work’s authenticity, I can’t envisage an auction house doing anything other than refunding the money,” he says. “Fighting the case just isn’t worth the potential damage to their reputation.”

Absolutely right, says Julian Roup, head of press at Bonham’s Auctioneers. Though he won’t discuss the Vekselberg case, he can assure customers that the company takes allegations of fakery most seriously.

If there’s any question over authenticity, “an immediate investigation is launched,” he declares. “We bend over backwards to establish the facts.”

And it’s amazing what a bit of forensic work can find out. Visit the web-archives of Freemanart, and you discover the tiny giveaway clues that can mean the difference between a painting securing you a fortune – or a spell in prison. Take the seemingly genuine Gainsborough, for example, where microscopic examination showed that the artist’s signature had been traced in pencil first for the forger to copy. Or the otherwise perfect Gauguin, given away by the paper it was painted on: the corners were straight, when they should have been round.

But while science’s principal contribution is to downgrade by proving that paintings are fakes, it can sometimes work the other way. Not just by showing that the Mona Lisa is holding a shawl (she is, though it’s invisible to the naked eye), but by upgrading a previously disregarded work.

For example, thanks to the miracle of dendrochronology (the science of dating objects using tree bark), a painting of Mary Queen of Scots, thought to have been an 18th-century copy, has been promoted by the National Portrait Gallery to the status of 16th-century original (tree ring analysis suggests 1560-1592).

Meanwhile, a Gloucestershire art collector, Frank Faryab, has, after five years and a lot of consultants’ fees, gathered sufficient scientific evidence to convince the art world that his oil painting of a distant ship is not the doodle of some old sea dog, but a lost Turner masterpiece, worth as much as £4 million.

Which is heartening news for all of us who dream of stumbling upon a Leonardo da Vinci in the lumber room. But that’s not to say, though, that the art world is always ready to welcome new paintings with open arms, just as it doesn’t like to see authenticated works discredited.

“For a previously disregarded work to be declared authentic, or a previously accepted work to be downgraded, a lot of people have to be proved wrong,” says Dr Grosvenor. “And if there’s one thing people in the art world don’t like, it’s being proved wrong.”

I enjoyed reading your story on Durer, but for once your journalistic instincts have deserted you. Somehow you've missed the big story about the Nuremburg show - which is that, in his honour, Playmobil have produced a special-edition mini Durer figure, painting his self-portrait.

I got one at the Prado a couple of months ago - you can pick them up from the Nuremburg tourist office, here:

http://tourismus.nuernberg.de/shop/

I mean, how cool is that?

Tate is the custodian of a national collection of British art since 1500, whether it wants to be or not. The unique breadth of the Tate collection of British art makes it a fundamental historical resource. History is popular: the Tate has tons of art illuminating themes such as the English Civil War and those gorgeous Georgians, which are constantly being explored in TV dramas and documentaries. Why does it assume no one is interested when there is so much evidence to the contrary?

Even if no one cared about the world of Joseph Wright of Derby, the Tate would still have a duty to show his art properly. A museum cannot just shrug off its responsibility to the public collection it holds. Or can it? Tate has apparently established the right to treat its collection not as our national property, to be on view for us to see and draw conclusions about, so much as the plaything of curators who can trawl it to create mediocre exhibitions such as the recent Migrations.

"At the moment, just over fifty percent of the works on display from the Collection at Tate Britain are pre-1900".

'Interesting that they apparently think that the fact that only almost half of what's up is 20thC gets them off the hook. When you've got a mandate to cover five centuries of art, it's a slightly odd defence.'

A painting by the eccentric English artist Sir Stanley Spencer has been stolen from an art gallery in Berkshire. Police said a window was smashed at the Stanley Spencer Gallery in High Street, Cookham at 01:00 BST on Sunday evening.

The thief took the painting entitled Cookham from Englefield (dated 1948) by the artist once dubbed 'the divine fool of British art'. The painting is privately owned and had been loaned to the gallery.

A fascinating recent story about the sale in the Wall Street Journal noted that: "In a rare move, Sotheby's sent the work to private homes in Asia, North America and Europe so key clients could test whether the haunting image clashed with the rest of their art collections." Potential buyers from a tiny pool of possibilities were said to include "European executives, Asian big-spenders and Middle Eastern sheiks."

In 1989, when the J. Paul Getty Museum went to auction and acquired Jacopo Pontormo's incomparable Mannerist "Portrait of a Halberdier" (1528-1530), the price paid was $35.2 million -- a public record for a 16th century painting. Adjusted for inflation, that's the equivalent of about $65 million today. "The Scream" is within shouting distance.

How about Vincent van Gogh's 1889 "Irises"? That Getty acquisition likely went over the Munch-mark [...] the payout for the purchase in 2012 currency would be more than $94 million.

Then there's Titian's stunning picture of individual power and tender pathos, the 1533 "Portrait of Alfonso d'Avalos, Marquis of Vasto, in Armor with a Page." Owned by an insurance company and on long-term loan to the Louvre, it was a 2003 private sale to the Getty, also at an undisclosed price. Reportedly it cost the museum $70 million. That's $87 million now -- meaning that, if accurate, the Getty has bought at least two works well within "Scream" territory.

ODDS are 3-to-1 that when Edvard Munch’s “Scream” comes up for sale at Sotheby’s on Wednesday night, it will fetch $150 million to $200 million. And there’s a 3-to-2 chance that pastel will become the most expensive artwork ever sold at auction, breaking the current record of $106.5 million set two years ago at Christie’s for Picasso’s “Nude, Green Leaves and Bust.” As for who will buy “The Scream,” bets are 5-to-2 that it will be a Russian, 3-to-1 an Asian or European and 4-to-1 an American. That’s the thinking, anyway, from Ladbrokes, the British bookmaking chain, which has been analyzing the fate of what Sotheby’s is billing as the most recognizable image in art history after the “Mona Lisa.”

I also plan to create another blog for a Poussin connoisseurship project that looks at problematic pictures in the Public Catalogue Foundation database and other on-line resources. It looks like on-line connoisseurship is coming into its own. Frank DeStefano has just started a series looking at the cataloguing of Giorgione by two noted scholars, Pignatti and Pedrocco; and Bendor Grosvenor is successfully using crowdsourcing to identify individuals in portraits on the PCF/BBC Your Paintings site.

While the troubles besetting the gallery are not confined to Millbank, in a national collection they are deeply disquieting, especially the unprecedented exodus of some of its senior curators. Most of the problems stem from Tate Britain’s invention in 2000 and the reorganisation that preceded it. The gallery then became responsible for the acquisition and showing of British art from c.1500 (inexplicably changed recently to 1550) to the present, with the historic collections ending in the early twentieth century. It is in effect the national gallery of the British School, a publicly accountable institution. Its management bears responsibility for the display of and access to its collections, the standard of its temporary exhibitions and the quality of its scholarship. A visit made to Tate Britain at the time of writing demonstrates all too clearly several shortcomings.

Current refurbishment has closed a number of rooms on the east side of the building. Of the fifteen or so rooms to the west, only one is devoted to the primary historic collection (with three much smaller ‘Focus’ rooms on aspects of seventeenth- and eight­eenth-century art). Double-hung, this anthology runs from Hans Eworth to Burne-Jones. Even if this is only a ‘temporary’ hang, it surely shows a contemptuous attitude to the collection and to its audience. Visitors from abroad may take delight in some popular Victorian paintings but they may well be disappointed to find in this room not a single Constable, an artist of whom they are likely to have heard.1 In the other galleries now open, eight are given over to A Walk through the Twentieth Century, an idiosyncratic, occasionally revealing, stroll that introduces the non-specialist to many obscure names among other well-known paintings and some good groups of sculpture. Throughout, wall labels omit any context or information beyond artist, title and date: a visitor wishing to know more of such representative figures of modern British art as Winifred Knights or James Gunn (individual works by them dominate two of the rooms) are left in ignorance. When the renovations are finished next year, it seems that a new hang will devote much more space to the historic British holdings. We can only hope that it will prove an arresting and visually authoritative display. It should also to some extent reflect, without losing sight of public interest, recent enlightening art-historical research into many aspects of British art in publications and exhibitions (including several fine ones held at Tate Britain itself). We hope not to see again those thematic displays with their clunky juxtapositions that in the early 2000s were greeted with considerable dismay; nor yet the somewhat skittish narrative currently in evidence.

Lucian Freud Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery will open until midnight from 24-26 May, in the lead up to the last day of the most popular paid-for exhibition in the gallery’s history, it was announced today (30 April).

Gallery figures released today reveal that since it opened on 9 February 2012, Lucian Freud Portraits has attracted over 175, 000 visitors so far, overtaking its previous record-breaking paying exhibitions Mario Testino Portraits (2002), David Hockney Portraits (2006) and Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer’s Life (2008). 

The extra tickets for the midnight openings on Thursday 24, Friday 25 and Saturday 26 May will go on sale today only (via Ticketmaster) at www.npg.org.uk/freud or by phone (0844 248 5033). The Gallery’s Portrait Restaurant will be taking bookings for dinner until 9.30pm and the exhibition shop will also be open.

Was just reading about the optimistic Ebay listing and when visiting was amused to see that someone had commented 'nice try'; now confess - was it you?!

"He was as still as anything and so professional," Ms Phipps said. "He didn't move at all, which is quite a feat seeing as he is 90. Most of my sitters would probably complain, but he didn't."

Claude Monet painted “The Bridge at Argenteuil” in 1874 with its blue water and sky and its white clouds and sail. Yet by the 21st century, the important painting was looking dull and needed to be cleaned.

“It struck me it was much too yellow. What disturbed me was that yellow varnish had accumulated in the interstices of the brushwork. With the magnifying loupe and the microscope, you see how thick the varnish layer was and how it altered the intention of the artist,” said Hoenigswald, senior conservator of paintings at the National Gallery, who works on the fading canvases.

Now that the refreshed Monet has been rehung in the newly arranged 19th Century French Galleries, Hoenigswald talks about her satisfaction with revealing the artist’s intentions.

‘There’s a return to the palette which was intended by the artist. The whites were no longer yellow, the blues were no longer green and the purple shadows emerged, as did the crisp texture of the brushwork,” she explained. “However, what is always the most striking is the sense of space which is reestablished when the discolored varnish is removed. It is particularly apparent in landscapes. The relationship between foreground, middle ground and background makes sense again.”

When Frank Faryab bought an obscure oil painting for thousands of pounds in a private sale, it was just the start of his outlay on the work.

For the art and antiques dealer has since spent more than £2million and much of the past five years trying to convince others it was by JMW Turner, one of Britain's greatest painters. [...]

He will not say how much he paid for the seascape, a 20in x 16in oil-on-pine panel of a hazy sailing ship, but he can list the great lengths he went to for the painting to gain recognition.

He has had the painting cleaned and reframed and has gathered scientific evidence, including infrared dating, checking fingerprints and artistic tests to prove its provenance.

When the National Gallery of Ireland acquired Louis le Brocquy's canvas A Family, in 2002, he became the first living Irish artist to have a painting in the collection. It is a modern parable. Le Brocquy, who has died aged 95, painted A Family in 1951, and Gimpel Fils, his London gallery from 1947 for the rest of his life, exhibited it that year. In 1952 a group of patrons offered to buy the painting for £400 and present it to the municipal gallery in Dublin, but the art advisory committee rejected it as incompetent.

Four years later, it won a prize at the Venice Biennale, was bought by the Nestlé Foundation and hung at its Milan headquarters until 2001. The Irish businessman Lochlann Quinn then bought it from Agnews in London for £1.7m, and with his wife, Brenda, presented it to the National Gallery of Ireland.

The idea that a copy should be produced in workshop is hardly a surprise. In our book on the Madonna and the Yarnwinder,  Thereza Wells and I showed that the two prime versions developed alongside each other, in this instance with Leonardo's participation in both. The only surprise is that a copy should be made of an intimate, domestic portrait of a bourgeois sitter. Perhaps Francesco del Giocondo wanted two versions. But it is odd. The implications of the landscape for the dating of the Mona Lisa - the background in the copy is aligned with drawings dateable to after 1510 - provides useful confirmation that the painting took a long time, but is not surprising. Was it ever completely finished? Were any of his paintings completely finished? The London Virgin of the Rocks, which was supplied for the frame in S. Francesco in Milan, is not finished. Only the Louvre seemed to think that the ML was completed before Leonardo left Florence in 1507.

Perhaps I shouldn't complain. It all helps sustain interest and helps sell (my) books.

By the way, we have absolutely no reliable evidence about what Salai looked like - and almost no firm evidence of how he painted. The pretty boy with ringlets, often identified as Salai, was a favourite facial type for Leonardo well before Salai came on to the scene.