A museum in Malmo, Sweden, was unaware of the theft of three of its works of art until police found them in a raid in nearby Landskrona.
An Edvard Munch painting, Two Friends, valued at $1.5 million, was discovered in the apartment raid by police, along with paintings by Swedish artist Gustaf Rydberg and Paer Siegaard.
Continue reading — Munch stolen in Sweden and nobody notices
French painter Paul Gauguin gets his first major exhibition in Britain for over 50 years this week, and early reviews suggest it was worth the wait.
A woman walks by French artist Paul Gauguin’s artwork ‘Aha oe Feii? (What! Are You Jealous?)’, at the Gauguin: Maker of Myth exhibition, at the Tate Modern, in London.
Two newspapers have given the show five stars, including the Times’ Rachel Campbell-Johnston who described “Gauguin: Maker of Myth” at London’s Tate Modern gallery “the show of the year.” Organizers say they have come up with a “fresh and compelling” look at the master of modern art, concentrating on his approach to storytelling and how myths and fables were central to his work.
Continue reading — “Show of the Year” at Tate Modern is UK’s First on French Painter Paul Gauguin in 50 Years
Spain’s prado Museum has discovered a previously unknown work by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, the 16th-century Flemish master, after cleaning a painting that had been attributed to his less illustrious son.
“The Wine of Saint Martin’s Day” is Bruegel’s largest surviving canvas, and one of his few signed works.
Bruegel is best known today for his peaceful winter scenes but the painting, The Wine of Saint Martin’s Day, certainly won’t work as a Christmas card. Instead of ice skaters gliding on a frozen pond, it features peasant revellers clamouring for wine and vomiting at a grape harvest bacchanalia.
Continue reading — Unknown Brueghel Canvas Discovered in Madrid
A doorman who works across from New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art found a painting outside his building and kept it for weeks, then realized it was a missing work at the center of a bizarre legal web and turned it in to investigators this week, an official said.
“Portrait of a Girl,” painted in the mid-1800s by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, vanished in late July after a middleman showing the work to a prospective buyer at a Manhattan hotel several blocks from the doorman’s building claimed he got drunk and lost it.
Continue reading — Official: Missing Painting Found by New York City Doorman
Christie’s announced the sale of the Collection of Max Palevsky, a superb group of over 250 works ranging from Antiquities to those by the most significant artists from the Impressionist and Modern and Post-War and Contemporary periods. The collection will be offered throughout multiple auctions starting in October 2010 at Christie’s New York and is expected to realize from $53 million to $78 million.
Richard Lindner, West 48th Street, 1964. Oil on canvas. Estimate: $600,000-800,000.
Born in Chicago, Palevsky (1924-2010) was an innovator and forerunner in computers and systems technology. His work continues to influence computing technology today. After serving in World War II, he traveled to New York and became fascinated with an exhibition on modern architecture at the Museum of Modern Art. It was then that he began to envision what a modern utopia could be. Palevsky was trained in mathematics and engineering and had a love for the literature of Balzac and Proust. In 1951 Palevsky leapt from a job as a philosophy professor at the University of California, Los Angeles to pursue computers technology, a fledgling field.
“We saw a class of problems that should be solved by computers, but for which no computers were being built.” — Max Palevsky, 1967
Continue reading — Christie’s to Offer the Magnificent Art Collection of Computing Pioneer Max Palevsky
JMW Turner, Sun Setting over a Lake circa 1840
It will be interesting to see whether Tate Britain’s new director, Penelope Curtis, can do anything about the curse of the Clore Gallery. This museum-within-a-museum housing Turner’s bequest to the nation of 300 oil paintings and more than 20,000 works on paper opened in 1987 to a chorus of boos from the critics. In fact, the building itself isn’t too bad; the problem is that the architect, James Stirling, put the bloomin’ thing in exactly the wrong place – to the side of the original 1897 gallery set back from the front entrance.
The positioning of the new building destroyed the integrity of the rest of collection by hamstringing the Tate’s ability to tell the story of British art in chronological order. However you hang the permanent collection, it is now impossible to place Turner where he belongs – smack in the middle, surrounded by the work of the artists he imitated, competed with and inspired.
Continue reading — Romantics at Tate Britain
“Portrait of a Girl” by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot. The painting is missing after a man hired to help sell the painting misplaced it after a night of drinking. The owner valued it at $1.4 million.
Tom Doyle and James Carl Haggerty weren’t hobnobbing in Manhattan, Miami or London in early 2007 as the art market was peaking.
They were confined in March and April to Ulster Correctional Facility, a medium-security prison 94 miles north of Sotheby’s York Avenue salesroom in New York. Doyle, now 53, had pleaded guilty to grand larceny related to the sale of a bronze Degas sculpture. Haggerty, 55, was convicted of vehicular assault, after a drunk-driving incident that caused serious injuries to two victims.
Now they’re linked to a missing $1.4 million Jean-Baptiste- Camille Corot painting, a story that started as an improbable man-walks-into-a-bar joke in New York tabloids and evolved into something more serious after a mug shot of Doyle, the art-crime felon, was matched to Tom Doyle, a co-owner of the Corot.
Continue reading — Corot Painting Suit to Be Dropped After Co-Owner Sees Mug Shot