Wales' Deputy Minister for Culture, Sport and Tourism (left) and David Anderson, Director General, Amgueddfa Cymru - National Museum Wales (right).
CARDIFF.- Rembrandt van Rijn’s Portrait of Catrina Hooghsaet (1607-1685) is being shown at National Museum Cardiff for a period of three years. The 17th-century portrait of a wealthy, independent, 50 year-old woman from Amsterdam was housed at Penrhyn Castle in North Wales until last year, when a private collector bought the work through Sotheby’s auction house. It has now been offered to National Museum Cardiff as a long-term loan and will be shown at the city centre national museum in its historic art galleries. The Museum will also benefit from a donation of £10k from the previous owner of the painting, to fund an educational programme. The work was painted by one of the most outstanding figures in the history of art. It is one of Rembrandt’s best portraits, and indeed one of the finest examples of his work in Britain. Rembrandt, through his work, had the ability ... More
The artwork, named 'Historien' or 'History' in Norwegian, was retrieved undamaged, a statement said.
OSLO(AFP).- Norwegian police on Wednesday announced the recovery of a valuable lithograph by Edvard Munch which was stolen in 2009, with two men arrested. The artwork, named 'Historien' or 'History' in Norwegian, was retrieved undamaged, a statement said. It shows an elderly bearded man speaking to a young boy and was valued at the time of its theft at 240,000 euros ($244,000), but art experts said it was too well-known to be put on the market. Police said two men had been arrested at the start of the week on suspicion of handling stolen goods but not for the theft itself. The lithograph was stolen after one of the windows of Nyborg Kunst, a leading Oslo gallery, was smashed with a rock. "My client denies the charge," Oystein Storrvik, the lawyer of one of the arrested men, told Norway's NTB news agency. The works of Munch (1863-1944) have long been ... More
Leonard A. Lauder, Chairman Emeritus of the Whitney Museum of American Art, was a trustee from 1977 to 2011.
NEW YORK, NY.- The inaugural Whitney Collection Award was presented to Leonard A. Lauder, the Museum’s Chairman Emeritus, at a dinner last night at the Whitney Museum of American Art, honoring Mr. Lauder for more than four decades of unstinting support. The Whitney Collection Award is given in recognition of an individual who has demonstrated an exceptional commitment to expanding the Museum’s collection and advancing our nation’s cultural heritage. As the Award was bestowed upon Mr. Lauder, it was announced that the Whitney’s new home in the Meatpacking District is being named the Leonard A. Lauder Building in his honor. The Renzo Piano–designed building, which is approaching its first-year anniversary on May 1, has been widely recognized as one of the most significant architectural projects in New York City this decade and a major ... More
WASHINGTON, DC.- “Robert Irwin: All the Rules Will Change,” a major exhibition by one of the leading postwar American artists, runs April 7–Sept. 5 at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. It is the first museum survey devoted to Irwin’s work from the pivotal decade of the 1960s, as well as the first U.S. museum survey outside his native California since 1977. The Hirshhorn is the exhibition’s only venue. A pioneer of California Light and Space art, Irwin (American, b. 1928, Long Beach, Calif.; lives and works in San Diego) is also a leading figure in broader movements away from discrete art objects in traditional media and toward an understanding of art as a perceptual experience. The exhibition, whose title is drawn from the artist’s writings, consists of two parts. ... More
LONDON.- Three artists have been shortlisted for the BP Portrait Award 2016 at the National Portrait Gallery, London, which will be presented on 21 June 2016 by athlete Jessica Ennis-Hill, it was announced today (Wed 6 April). Of the 2,557 portraits from 80 countries submitted for judging by a panel including artist Jenny Saville and writer Alan Hollinghurst, three have been shortlisted for the First Prize. They are Cambridgeshire-based Clara Drummond for Girl in a Liberty Dress; Benjamin Sullivan, who lives in Suffolk, for Hugo, his portrait of the poet Hugo Williams; and from China Bo Wang for Silence, a portrait of his dying Grandmother. While Clara Drummond has now been selected five times and Benjamin Sullivan 12 times for BP Portrait Award exhibitions, Bo Wang is selected for the first time. He is only the second artist from China to be shortlisted for the First Prize; Clara Drummond and Benjamin Sullivan ... More
Louise Bourgeois, Sainte Sebastienne, 1992 Drypoint on paper, 120.5 x 94.3 cm, courtesy the artist and Marlborough Graphics, London.
LONDON.- Louise Bourgeois, Anish Kapoor, Richard Serra and Kiki Smith, four internationally renowned sculptors, each of whom have made iconic works. Less well known, though equally regarded is their printmaking. Sculpture and printmaking have always had an affinity, and as Nancy Campbell writes in her introduction to the show, `it’s bewitching when a sculptor brings their sensibility for space to the constraints of a single plane, and unafraid of technical experiment, explore different means of making marks’. This show brings together selected prints by the four artists, each making their unique mark in print. Anish Kapoor’s series Shadows and Horizon Shadows present bands of light and dark out of which vibrate rich fields of colour; aquamarine, scarlet, magenta, cobalt blue. The colours recall the mountains ... More
The original works for the portfolio were first exhibited in 2014 at the Terezin Ghetto Museum in the Czech Republic.
FLUSHING, NY.- In its first New York showing, Mark Podwal’s “Terezin Portfolio,” a limited edition suite of 42 archival pigment prints based on a series of original acrylic, gouache, and colored pencil drawings entitled All this has come upon us… are on view at the Godwin-Ternbach Museum at Queens College. The exhibition, open to the public from April 4 to June 4, 2016, including Holocaust Remembrance Day on May 5, celebrates the recent donation of the portfolio by Podwal, a Queens College alumnus, physician and artist. The original works for the portfolio were first exhibited in 2014 at the Terezin Ghetto Museum in the Czech Republic and, in Podwal’s words, “are disturbing reminders of how the extensive history of anti-Semitism laid the groundwork for the Holocaust.” Each print depicts a tragedy or injustice ... More
LONDON.- In October 1974, Muhammad Ali would attempt to regain the world heavyweight boxing championship title that was stripped from him when he refused the Vietnam draft seven years earlier. He faced the brutal, undefeated George Foreman in Zaire, Africa, the fight he had dubbed “The Rumble in The Jungle”. Only weeks before, on August 24-25, photographer Peter Angelo Simon was invited to experience the private world of one of the most famous people on the planet as he prepared mentally and physically for the biggest challenge of his life. In 2016, Reel Art Press and Serena Morton II present Muhammad Ali: Fighter’s Heaven 1974, rare photographs, the majority previously unpublished, presented as a 176-page hardback book and accompanying exhibition. This two-day photo essay captures Ali the man, unguarded, away from the glare of ... More
Valencia Bakery No. 1: Head Decorator Nancy, 2012. Digital C-print, 33 x 50 inches. Courtesy of the artist.
PARIS.- The sale of the personal collection of Bernard Boutet de Monvel (1881-1949) concluded tonight in Paris with an outstanding total of €9,293,271 ($10,611,057) - five times the pre-sale expectations (€1.8-2.8 million) - and 93% of the lots sold. Over the course of two days, over 550 private collectors, dealers and art institutions from 30 countries from across the world participated in a sale which revealed the genius of Bernard Boutet de Monvel to a wider audience. A third of the buyers were completely new to Sotheby’s and 14% of them chose to buy online. Bernard Boutet de Monvel was highly admired in France and across the Atlantic during his lifetime. Yet until today, his oeuvre and his life, worthy of a Fitzgerald novel, were little known. Testament to the importance of the artist’s oeuvre in the history of art, eight works by the ... More
LONDON.-Victoria Miro presents Apple Bombs, an exhibition of new paintings by the Copenhagen-based artist John Kørner. Painting, for Kørner, serves the unambiguous, if impalpable, function of exercising the imagination much in the same way as a bicycle stretches out the legs. The artist’s previous work has variously taken the situations of sex workers and Danish soldiers killed in combat in Afghanistan as points of departure, alluding to its topical content with various degrees of abstraction and metaphor; in this exhibition, aspects of contemporary geopolitics including imbalances of wealth and the displacement of populations are obliquely problematised. Rather than predetermined allegorical narratives, the paintings in Apple Bombs present a constellation of seemingly ... More
Andy Warhol, Moonwalk, 1987. Estimate: $200,000-300,000.
NEW YORK, NY.-Phillips announced highlights from the New York Evening and Day Sales of Modern and Contemporary Editions, featuring Works on Paper, which will take place on 25 April. The two sessions will offer 346 lots, featuring works by icons of 20th century art, including Andy Warhol, Yves Klein, Keith Haring, Roy Lichtenstein, and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. A variety of media will be represented, from Yves Klein’s Victoire de Samothrace , to fluorescently inked screenprints by Keith Haring and KAWS, to a group of ceramics by Pablo Picasso. Kelly Troester, Phillips’ Worldwide Co-Director, Modern Editions, and Cary Leibowitz, Phillips’ Worldwide Co-Director, Contemporary Editions, said, “We are so pleased that our April sale highlights the very best that the category has to offer. Spanning across the 20th century, a breadth of genres will be offered, including German expressionism, pop art, modernism, ... More
Haroon Mirza, Duet, 2013. Mixed media, 172 x 149 x 25 cm. Image by Lisson Gallery.
SAO PAULO.-The São Paulo International Art Fair presents an innovative mix of emerging and renowned local and international artists, represented by 124 prominent galleries, from Brazil and abroad. The Fair hosts Brazil's leading galleries with contemporary artworks and classic masterpieces from Brazil's modernist period. SP-Arte also announced the addition of young Brazilian galleries participating for the first time, some of which are Boiler, Frente, Mamute, Sé, and BFA (Boatos Fine Arts). Notable international galleries continue to invest in Brazil's growing art scene, Lisson Gallery noted: "The past three editions of the fair have proven the existence of a young but solid market, supported by the rise of new collections with a more edgy and heterogenous profile of international artists." Other high-profile exhibitors include Cardi, Continua, David Zwirner, Michael Werner, ... More
A chair used, and later decorated, by author J.K. Rowling while she wrote the first two Harry Potter books. William EDWARDS / AFP.
NEW YORK(AFP).- The chair on which British author J.K. Rowling sat to write the first two volumes of her best-selling "Harry Potter" series sold at auction in New York on Wednesday for $394,000. The modest, 1930s-era oak chair was part of a mismatched set of four that Rowling was given for free when she was a single mother living in subsidized housing in the Scottish city of Edinburgh. Heritage Auctions said it sold for $394,000, including taxes -- nearly 14 times the price that it last fetched at auction in 2009. The 50-year-old author used the chair to write "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone" and "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets" published in 1997 and 1998, respectively. "This was the comfiest one, which is why it ended up stationed permanently in front of my typewriter, supporting me while I typed," Rowling wrote in a letter accompanying the chair, said ... More
Quote On painting and fighting look far off. John Ray
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Exhibition of human/animal hybrids by Christie Brown opens at Arthouse1 gallery LONDON.- Christie Brown creates human/animal hybrids often reminiscent, in form and posture, of the figurative objects of ancient Egypt and China. In doing so she has harnessed the ability of such archaic and mythical artefacts to speak across time; to propose links between the ancient and the contemporary. Collaged from Brown’s archive of moulds along with free-built elements, the new statues and portrait busts of Rara Avis contain echoes of earlier projects including the figures of DreamWork (Freud Museum, 2012-13), inspired by Sigmund Freud’s collection of antiquities, and A Thwarted Dynasty, a series of ceramic busts in which she portrayed the estranged Soane family, first shown at the Sir John Soane Museum in 2013. However, in this body of work her use of collage brings a new sense of complexity, one that makes it hard for the viewer to impose ... More
Pirelli HangarBicocca presents a solo exhibition by Carsten Höller, "Doubt" MILAN.- The exhibition “Doubt” divides the space at Pirelli HangarBicocca into two halves, which can be accessed through two different entrances. Visitors have to decide for a color, green or yellow, in order to enter. They will find the artworks aligned along the middle axis of the space. This alignment of works forms a central dividing wall, where visitors will see/experience only half of a given work, and have to remember the half they have seen until they encounter the other half on the other side. More than twenty large-scale works will be exhibited, including Zöllner Stripes (2001-on going), Decision Corridors (2015), Flying Mushrooms (2015), Two Flying Machines (2015), Double Neon Elevator (2016) and Light Corridor (2016). Visitors will be able to sleep at Pirelli HangarBicocca, spending a night on Two Roaming Beds (Grey) (2015), two single beds that drift endlessly ... More
Bronx-focused exhibitions open today at Bronx Museum BRONX, NY.-The Bronx Museum of the Arts presents four concurrent exhibitions that highlight the diverse communities, cityscapes, and natural beauty of the Bronx. Two solo exhibitions by artists Martine Fougeron and Valeri Larko present a series of works that document the industrial hubs and landscapes of the borough. Two additional exhibitions draw from the Museum’s permanent collection, including Spotlight: John Ahearn and Rigoberto Torres, which features a series of sculptures produced between 1985 and 1998 that depict residents of the South Bronx. The other, Beyond the Veil: Works from the Permanent Collection, highlights works by contemporary artists examining issues of identity and culture that reflect our diverse communities. Martine Fougeron: The South Bronx Trades features a series of photographs by French-born, New York-based photographer ... More
TJ Boulting's first solo show with South African artist HelenA Pritchard opens in London LONDON.-TJ Boulting presents the gallery’s first solo show with South African artist HelenA Pritchard. A 2011 graduate from the Royal College of Art MA in Painting, since then her work has expanded beyond the realms of painting into the sculptural, the object and most recently beyond that into the extra dimension of light. The common thread between them all being her utilisation of form, colour and material. Crossovers and layering are central to her new explorations, combining the traditional materials of painting and sculpture with everyday objects like netting, wire, mesh, silk, plants, plastic and packaging. Once assembled, the works also respond to each other in the space in which they are intended. The often ephemeral and unfixed nature of the work is due to this context of installation, a response to something, someone, or a place. Often her experimental use of materials, ... More
Landmark exhibition features 12 pioneering artists and challenges stereotypes WASHINGTON, DC.- A landmark exhibition of photographs by 12 contemporary women artists from Iran and the Arab world will be on view at the National Museum of Women in the Arts from April 8–July 31, 2016. She Who Tells a Story: Women Photographers from Iran and the Arab World challenges stereotypes surrounding the people, landscapes, and cultures of the region, and provides insight into political and social issues. The exhibition presents more than 80 photographs and a video installation. These provocative works—most created within the last decade—range in genre from portraiture, to documentary, to staged narratives. She Who Tells a Story explores themes of identity, war, occupation, and protest. It refutes the conventional idea that Arab and Iranian women are oppressed or powerless, illuminating the fact that women are creating some of the most significant ... More
Exhibition of selected works from the collection of Vladimir Ovcharenko opens in Moscow MOSCOW.-Moscow Museum of Modern Art presents the Borscht and Champagne, an exhibition of selected works from the collection of Vladimir Ovcharenko, featuring works by Russian and international artists, including Leon Golub, Konstantin Zvezdochetov, Ilya Kabakov, Jonathan Meese, pavel pepperstein, Jack pierson, Richard prince, Ivan Chuikov, Dana Schutz and Tracey Emin. Vladimir Ovcharenko is the founder of Regina Gallery, one of the first galleries of contemporary art in Russia, established in 1990, as well as an art collector, who has greatly contributed to the development and popularization of contemporary art in Russia. Showing no preference for any particular genre, he collects works in many styles and media. Vladimir Ovcharenko’s collection contains works by leading Russian and international artists, including representatives of Russian Art ... More
One of last jazz giants, Sonny Rollins not finished at 85 NEW YORK(AFP).- One of the last in a generation of jazz greats, Sonny Rollins once thought music could change the world. His optimism about humanity has since vanished but, at 85, he still has much he wants to say. The "Saxophone Colossus," a nickname that was also the title of his seminal 1956 album, is among a handful of sax players including John Coltrane, Charlie Parker and Coleman Hawkins who defined the instrument, with Rollins creating a heavy-charging, mordant style that was also readily experimental. The hard-working tenor saxophonist has taken several extended sabbaticals, most famously when he temporarily retired -- yet would practice on New York's Williamsburg Bridge. He later moved to India and Japan to explore spirituality. His latest break is less intentional -- respiratory problems have kept him from playing since 2012. "I am not finished with what ... More
Nate Ethier's first solo exhibition in New York opens at Nancy Margolis Gallery NEW YORK, NY.-Nancy Margolis Gallery presents Nate Ethier’s first solo exhibition in New York, with Nancy Margolis Gallery, Speak About The Ocean opening on Thursday, April 7, 2016. The artist’s reception will be held April 7, 6 to 8pm. The exhibition will remain on view through May 14, 2016. Nate Ethier’s stunning geometric abstractions resonate with intense color and distinct forms. The principal themes and characteristics in his paintings are a loosely formatted grid, striking color, layered marks, and systems structured rigidly, evenly and at times symmetrically. Strong contrasting colors, gestural brush strokes, opaque to transparent layers intertwine austere minimalism with moments of subtle softness. Treasured childhood memories impact Ethier’s consciousness as seen in the rendering of building bricks a link to his father, and in the title of the exhibition, Speak About Oceans, ... More
Works by Wiggins, Cole, Mignot to headline Shannon's April 28 auction MILFORD, CONN.- Two exemplary Manhattan snow scenes by Guy Carleton Wiggins (Am., 1883-1962), a newly rediscovered work by New York painter Thomas Cole (1801-1848), and a previously unrecorded work by Luis Remy Mignot (N.Y./S.C., 1831-1870) are just a few of the 275 lots that will come up for bid on Thursday, April 28th, at Shannon’s Fine Art Auctioneers. The auction will be held in the firm’s gallery at 354 Woodmont Road in Milford, beginning at 6 p.m. Eastern time, plus online at Invaluable.com. Offered will be two “catalogs within a catalog” – one a collection of 44 scenes of New York from the early 20th century to the present, the other a group of paintings by the dynamic Provincetown artist Charles Webster Hawthorne (1872-1930). The sale will also feature artworks by Hudson River School painters, wonderful still-lifes, works by Western artists, ... More
The collection of Henri Canonne
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Flashback
On a day like today, Italian-French painter Gino Severini was born
September 07, 1883. Gino Severini (7 April 1883 - 26 February 1966) was an Italian painter and a leading member of the Futurist movement. For much of his life he divided his time between Paris and Rome. He was associated with neo-classicism and the "return to order" in the decade after the First World War. In this image: A visitor looks at paintings, 'Femme a la Mandoline' (L) and 'Les joueurs de Cartes' (R) by Italian futurist and neo-classic artist Gino Severini,1883-1966, at the Orangerie Museum in Paris.
