Personnel from the Stadel Museum hang Sandro Botticelli’s “Minerva and the Centaur” a few days before the exhibition opens in Frankfurt.

The Städel Museum will show the first monographic exhibition on Sandro Botticelli (1444/45–1510) in the German-speaking world from 13 November 2009 to 28 February 2010. Taking the artist’s monumental Idealized Portrait of a Lady, one of the Städel Museum collection’s highlights, as its starting point, the exhibition presents numerous works from all productive periods of this great master of the Renaissance in Italy about 500 years after his day of death (17 May 1510). The exhibition opens with portraits and allegorical paintings that illustrate the degree of sophistication with which Botticelli drew on this highly developed genre and enriched it with new impulses. While the second chapter centers on his famous mythological representations of goddesses and heroines of virtue, the third part is dedicated to his abundant religious oeuvre. With a total of more than forty works by Botticelli and his workshop, the show presents a comprehensive selection of his work surviving worldwide. Forty further exhibits, among them works by such contemporaries as Andrea del Verrocchio, Filippino Lippi, and Antonio del Pollaiuolo, will allow to understand Botticelli’s precious creations in the historical context of their genesis. The presentation is supported by outstanding loans from the most important collections of paintings in Europe and the United States. These include the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, the Louvre in Paris, the National Gallery London, the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin, and the Old Masters Picture Gallery in Dresden, as well as the Metropolitan Museum in New York and the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

Continue reading — Sandro Botticelli in The Stadel Museum

French and Italian could be heard throughout Christie’s salesroom Tuesday night as the fall auction season began unsteadily: While there were some strong prices, there also expensive failures.

It was a thin sale of Impressionist and modern art, with just 40 works on offer and prices that fell below estimates. The evening totaled $65.6 million but had been estimated to bring at least $68.6 million.

At an auction in New York on Tuesday, “Danseuses,” a painting by Edgar Degas, brought $9.5 million ($10.7 million including fees to Christie’s), well above its $9 million high estimate.

Throughout the night at the salesroom at Rockefeller Center, what bidding there was took place mostly on the telephone, with Christie’s representatives from Hong Kong to London making offers on behalf of clients. The weak dollar apparently made buying in New York quite attractive to foreigners. Auction house executives said only 29 percent of the buyers were Americans, while 42 percent of the buyers were Europeans, a category that includes Russians.

Continue reading — Degas Pastel Is Highlight of a Tepid Christie’s Sale

Caravaggio (Italian 1571-1610). Bacchus, 1595. Oil on canvas, 37 x 33 inches.

The tiny image of the Renaissance master is hidden in a carafe of wine in his 1597 oil painting Bacchus, one of his most acclaimed works which hangs in Florence’s Uffizi Gallery.

It shows a man, thought to be Caravaggio at the age of 25, with dark curly hair, peeping out from the inside of the carafe. He is holding a paint brush and working at an easel. The tiny figure’s nose, eyes and the collar around his neck are visible.

Continue reading — Tiny Caravaggio self-portrait revealed by technology

It’s the business … Martin Westwood’s corporate collage, Sunset Clause (2004)

Martin Westwood makes art from corporate culture. Literally: he builds sculptures using the paraphernalia of commerce, fabricating collages out of brochures, pie-charts, carpet tiles and paperclips. The resulting installations sit somewhere between the sterile world of the car showroom, with its promotional balloons and paperless desks, and the artworks of early modernists like László Moholy-Nagy. If that description sounds dry, Westwood’s earlier training as a painter at the Royal College of Art means that he successfully combines the aseptic feel of 20th-century mass design with a more painterly aesthetic.

Continue reading — Martin Westwood

Jean-Leon Gerome, “Man with a Waterpipe and Dog”. Estimate: £800,000 to £1,200,000

Christie’s will offer a highly curated auction of 24 Orientalist masterpieces on November 25, 2009 in London. An important Private Collection of 9 works will form the core of the sale and includes four works by Jean-Léon Gérôme and three exceptional watercolors by John Frederick Lewis. These works will be complimented by important masterpieces of the highest standard from other sources including “A Square” by the New Mosque in Istanbul by Karl Paul Themistocles von Eckenbrecher which was painted by the artist for the World Exhibition in Vienna in 1873, and “Souk el Khemis” by Jacques Majorelle which is illustrated on the front cover of the artist’s Catalogue Raisonée. The sale is expected to realize in the region of £8 million.

Continue reading — Christie’s to Present an Important Auction of Orientalist Masterpieces in London

Bill Thompson, Toro, 2009, 24″ x 20″ x 7″ Urethane on polyurethane block.

Thatcher Projects presents Shift an exhibition of new work by Bill Thompson. From curvilinear and cloud-like to pointedly flexed and bowing, Thompson’s colorful wall structures combine painting and sculpture into a unique minimalist art form.

Continue reading — Bill Thompson