The Procession to Calvary by Bruegel will stay on display at Nostell Priory in Yorkshire after an appeal raised £2.7m.

A masterpiece that has hung at a West Yorkshire landmark for more than 200 years has been saved after a fundraising campaign came up with £2.72m in just three months. Pieter Brueghel the Younger’s stunning The Procession to Calvary has been one of the stars of Wakefield’s Nostell Priory for more than two centuries.

But, as reported in the YEP, the painting was put up for sale by its owner, Lord St Oswald, towards the end of last year, meaning it was at risk of being lost to the public.

Continue reading — Bruegel masterpiece saved by £2.7m campaign

Two North Italian style tables with opposing winged griffins reputedly sold for a fraction of their construction price.

Christie’s will announce record global sales of £3.2 billion ($5 billion) for 2010 next month. The figure includes both auction sales and private sales, and just nudges ahead of the company’s previous high of £3.1 billion in 2007. Sotheby’s will announce its figures in dollars, and its website indicates that its global auction sales have almost doubled last years, reaching $4.3 billion, not including private sales.

Sotheby’s shares opened at $47.25 in New York yesterday, more than double the $21.76 low earlier in the year.

Continue reading — A record year for Christie’s

East façade, view across Ultimo Pedestrian Network, model scale: 1-to-10

Sydney’s Frank Gehry designed Dr Chau Chak Wing building will open a new page in business education in Australia. The world-renowned architect’s plans for the $150 million building, his only in Australia, were unveiled at a media conference at the University of Technology, Sydney.

UTS has been working with Gehry Partners to design a world-class business school based on the idea of a tree-house structure. As Frank Gehry has put it, “a trunk and core of activity and… branches for people to connect and do their private work.”

The building will have two distinct external facades, one composed of undulating brick, referencing the sandstone and the dignity of Sydney’s urban brick heritage, and the other of large, angled sheets of glass to fracture and mirror the image of surrounding buildings.

Continue reading — Frank Gehry’s Design for University of Technology, Sydney Envisions a New Kind of Business School

Comcast Center, a prismatic glass curtainwall office tower in Philadelphia carries forward the proportions of the classical obelisk.

Robert A. M. Stern, whose influential designs have revitalized traditional architecture, has been named the 2011 recipient of the Richard H. Driehaus Prize for Classical Architecture. Stern will receive $200,000 and a model of the Choregic Monument of Lysikrates during a March 26 ceremony in Chicago.

As Founder and Senior Partner of Robert A. M. Stern Architects, and as Dean of the Yale School of Architecture, Stern has built a reputation as a modern traditionalist architect. In his work as an architect, as a scholar, and as a teacher, he is dedicated to reconnecting the present and future with the past, building upon what went before to extend the trajectory of architecture.

Continue reading — Robert A. M. Stern Named 2011 Driehaus Prize for Classical Architecture Laureate

Projections of Paolo Veronese’s “Wedding at Cana,” part of “Leonardo’s Last Supper: A Vision by Peter Greenaway,” shown during a press preview at the Park Avenue Armory.

If you had tied on a blindfold, suspended disbelief and allowed yourself to be carried last week to a particular location just off Park Avenue near 66th Street, your reopened eyes would have had trouble telling that they were not inside the Santa Maria delle Grazie monastery in Milan, looking at a sight everyone knows and few have actually seen: a magisterial painting of 13 enrobed men seated oddly on one side of a long dinner table. Even many experts would not have been able to distinguish the wall mural in front of them from the real one, Leonardo’s “Last Supper,” that “most beautiful and marvelous work,” as Vasari described it, doomed to crumble almost from the minute its tempera dried.

Continue reading — “Last Supper” for the Laptop Generation

Pierre Le Guyennec, a retired electrician, speaks to journalists outside his home in Mouans Sartoux, Southern France, 29 November 2010. Mr. Le Guyennec, who worked for Pablo Picasso, claims he has hundreds of previously unknown works by the artist. The treasure trove of 271 pieces includes lithographs, cubist paintings, notebooks and a watercolor, and is said to be worth about 60m euros. Pierre Le Guennec reportedly said Picasso gave him the works as gifts. But the estate’s administrators have filed a case for alleged illegal receipt of the works of art. The works include a portrait of the late artist’s first wife, Olga.

Pablo Picasso was both hugely prolific and famously generous with his work, but was he enough of a free spirit to give hundreds of his early works — an invaluable collection — to his electrician?

That question lies at the heart of a court case over the origin of 271 Picasso works — a treasure trove of original sketches, paintings and collages that was unknown to the art world a few months ago and unveiled for the public on Monday.

Experts have yet to appraise the full collection, which has been placed under lock and key after a judicial appeal by Picasso’s heirs. But there is little dispute so far over its authenticity. The works, many of which belong to the artist’s Blue and Cubist periods, could fetch more than 60 million euros ($79 million) at auction.

Continue reading — Electrician Stuns Art World with Trove of Picasso Works of Art

“Robert Rauschenberg,” a survey at Gagosian Gallery, includes “Palladian Xmas” (1980), with acrylic, fabric and collage on wood.

Robert Rauschenberg, the subject of a chock-a-block time capsule of a show at Gagosian Gallery in Chelsea, was an optimist and a doer. He not only did what artists normally do: make paintings, sculptures, prints and photographs. He also did the work of performers, musicians, philanthropists and career politicians.

He danced, composed, gave away money and initiated diplomatic missions, always on behalf of art. He believed that if he, or we, or anyone could just produce enough art, then art and life would be the same thing, and the world would change for the better. So, committed universal citizen that he was, he kept trying to make enough.

Continue reading — Robert Rauschenberg at Gagosian Gallery