Nov 22nd, 2020 - The auction house Sotheby’s said it had authenticated “an extraordinary re-emergence” of drawings by one of Britain’s most important artists. “These works have lain hidden for the best part of 200 years in an album compiled by the Mason family of Colchester,” said Mark Griffith-Jones, a Sotheby’s specialist in British watercolours and drawings. “It is full of all sorts of weird and wonderful objects and images and these four drawings.” The works include a watercolour drawing of a rural landscape signed J Constable and dated 5 April 1794, which was when he was 17, making it ...

Nov 20th, 2020 - In Pictures | Andy Warhol's explicit drawings from the 1950s that he never got to publish New book brings together hundreds of images of nude young men, which “are imbued with an emotional vulnerability that few of his later works exhibit” Andy Warhol always wanted to publish his highly homoerotic 1950s drawings portraying mainly nude young men kissing, posing or engaging in sexual acts such as fellatio. The Pop art pioneer showed a selection of these taboo-busting works—primarily rendered in ink on paper—at New York’s Bodley Gallery in 1956 (Studies For [sic] a Boy Book ) but never ...

Nov 19th, 2020 - A new online exhibition revisits the fate of stolen or vanished paintings by the likes of van Gogh, Monet and Cézanne In March, as much of the world went into lockdown due to the Covid-19 pandemic, thieves broke into the Netherlands’ shuttered Singer Laren museum and made off with a costly Vincent van Gogh landscape: The Parsonage Garden at Nuenen in Spring (1884). The audacious smash-and-grab raid shocked officials, and though ransom photos of the work later surfaced, the painting itself—a muted landscape dominated by grays and browns—has not yet been recovered. Now, an online ...

Nov 19th, 2020 - Every so often, a researcher or an art dealer or a historian pops out of the woodwork with a piece of art that they claim can be attributed to one of the most famous artists in the world . This week, Annalisa Di Maria, an Italian art historian, has come forward with a sketch that she believes to be an original, red-chalk drawing done by none other than Leonardo da Vinci, the Renaissance polymath responsible for the creation of the Mona Lisa . The sketch, which was most recently kept in a private collection contained within a bank in Lombardy, Italy, appears to be a somber rendition of Jesus ...

Nov 19th, 2020 - Adventures with Van Gogh is a weekly blog by Martin Bailey, our long-standing correspondent and expert on the artist. Published every Friday, his stories will range from newsy items about this most intriguing artist to scholarly pieces based on his own meticulous investigations and discoveries. A separated pair: the story behind Van Gogh’s famed empty chairs An insight into what the two paintings reveal about Vincent's life with Gauguin in the Yellow House On 19 November 1888, Vincent wrote to his brother Theo about his two latest pictures, describing them as “rather funny”. One was of ...

Nov 18th, 2020 - The Italian art historian claims the drawing is a study for Leonardo's actual, lost "Salvator Mundi." An Italian scholar claims to have discovered a new drawing of Jesus Christ by Leonardo da Vinci that confirms doubts that the Renaissance master painted Salvator Mundi , the world’s most expensive work of art . A private collector in Lecco showed the red chalk drawing of Jesus Christ to Annalisa Di Maria, a Leonardo scholar associated with the  UNESCO Center in Florence , and she immediately saw in it the hand of Leonardo. "[This] is the true face of  Salavator Mundi ," Di Maria told  La ...

Nov 16th, 2020 - New book, which reveals how the Old Masters influenced the 18th-century British artist, has won the William MB Berger Prize for British Art History A trailblazing publication on Thomas Gainsborough has won the 2020 William MB Berger Prize for British Art History, a UK-based award for scholarly publications which “recognises excellence in the field of British art history”. A panel of seven judges picked Thomas Gainsborough. The Portraits, Fancy Pictures and Copies after Old Masters by Hugh Belsey (published by Yale University Press for The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art) as ...

Nov 16th, 2020 - A case linked to a high-profile Old Master forgery ring is back in court. The investment company Fairlight Art Ventures is appealing a December court ruling ordering that it reimburse Sotheby’s $6 million after the auction house sold on its behalf a Frans Hals painting now believed to be a forgery. The once-purported Old Master canvas is one of a number of works purchased from French art dealer and collector Giuliano Ruffini that were exposed as likely fakes in 2016. The alleged forgery ring is linked to sales of as much as €200 million ($255 million) in suspect works . Fairlight Art ...

Nov 14th, 2020 - In July 2018, London’s National Gallery acquired a self-portrait by the Baroque artist Artemisia Gentileschi, featuring the painter in the guise of Saint Catherine of Alexandria. Almost immediately, it drew an unprecedented level of media attention. First of all, there was its £3.6 million price tag. Then, there was the fact it was painted by one of the greatest artists of the 17th century who just so happens to be a woman, marking only the twentieth painting by a female artist within the gallery’s collection of over 2,300 works. Third, and perhaps most intriguingly, was its concurrence ...

Oct 21st, 2020 - Portr-8 , the inaugural exhibition of the contemporary African photography gallery Doyle Wham , showcases innovative and experimental portraits by eight new African artists at ECAD in south London. The artists, from Gabon, Nigeria, Namibia, Kenya and Mozambique, are united by a desire to challenge traditional ideas and narrow interpretations of Africa, African art, and African society “MILK is not about race, but about perception, and what we subjectively perceive as beautiful. It forms part of a broader project, Shades of Industry, that hopes to redefine beauty standards through art. Dark ...

Oct 21st, 2020 - An oil painting by British street artist Banksy parodying a Claude Monet masterpiece sold in London on Wednesday for £7.6 million, the second highest price at auction for the mysterious artist. The oil on canvas work, "Show Me the Monet", a modern take on Monet’s impressionist classic "The Water-Lily Pond", sold for £7,551,600 ($9.8 mn, 8.4 mn euros) at Sotheby’s following a bidding battle. "The hammer came down after five determined collectors battled for nearly nine minutes to drive the final price beyond its estimate of £3,000,000-5,000,000 to become the second highest price for the ...

Oct 16th, 2020 - The venerable Brooklyn Museum for decades struggled with a structural deficit, as well as a relatively small endowment and staff to take care of its 150,000-object art collection. Then came the global pandemic, forcing the 197-year-old institution to shut its doors for months along with the rest of the country’s museums. Furloughs followed as revenue plunged. Lucas Cranach’s “Lucretia” This month, the museum began selling artworks from its collection to help make ends meet. On Thursday, Lucas Cranach’s “Lucretia” fetched $5.1 million at Christie’s, almost triple the high ...

Oct 15th, 2020 - The late artist's debut at Frieze Masters, plus stellar sales at auction, signal a turning point for the pioneering Modernist's visibility. Ben Enwonwu has long been a household name in Nigeria and in African art circles. Yet it was only three years ago that the late pioneer of African art—often called “the father of African Modernism” and arguably one of the most influential African artists of the 20th century—was rediscovered outside the continent. At this year’s digital edition of Frieze Masters, the late artist is being shown by the  , which was founded this year by ...