Feb 28th, 2021 - The world is full of things that at first blush don’t go together at all. Peanut butter and chocolate, anyone? And in the world of art, no less so. This week, the (MFAH) brought together the illustrious late-19th-century Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh and the major contemporary British multimedia artist David Hockney. Didn’t see that coming, did you? These are trying times for Texans and Houstonians, of course, as they recover from the whims of nature and human hubris, so how apropos that ...
Feb 28th, 2021 - More than 100 impressionist masterworks, including 19 Monet paintings, will travel to Melbourne from the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston this year as part of the National Gallery of Victoria’s Winter Masterpieces exhibition. NGV director Tony Ellwood announced the blockbuster exhibition on Monday as part of the gallery’s unveiling of its 2021 program – an announcement delayed by two weeks due to Melbourne’s snap five-day lockdown in February. Along with the Monet works, paintings from ...
Feb 25th, 2021 - Works by Mark Rothko , Helen Frank Frankenthaler, Francis Bacon, and more modern masters are heading to the Seattle Art Museum as a part of a landmark gift. The museum announced on Thursday that it has received 19 artworks from the Friday Foundation, led by the heirs of the late Seattle arts collectors and patrons Jane Lang Davis and Richard Lang. The gift also carries $10.5 million in funds dedicated to the museum’s postwar and contemporary art conservation programs. In addition to the ...
Feb 25th, 2021 - Picture: haltadefinizione.com Posted by Adam Busiakiewicz: Florence's Uffizi Gallery and Pitti Palace have digitised six of their Raphaels to gigapixel quality onto the website haltadefinizione.com . This includes the following pictures, Ritratto di giovane con pomo (1504 circa), Madonna del Granduca (1506 - 1507 circa), Ritratto di Tommaso Inghirami detto Fedra (1510 - 1511 circa, Velata (1512 - 1515 circa) (pictured), Ritratto del Cardinale Bibbiena (1516 circa) and San Giovanni Battista nel ...
Feb 24th, 2021 - The Paris court shot down the Pompidou and Koons's appeal of the long-running case. In a double hit of bad news for art star Jeff Koons, a French appeals court not only upheld a 2018 decision that found him and the Pompidou Centre guilty of copyright infringement , but also increased his fine. French photographer Frank Davidovici initially brought the lawsuit in 2015, alleging that Koons had copied his photo for an ad campaign for the clothing line Naf Naf. Koons’s 1988 sculpture Fait ...
Feb 24th, 2021 - New research suggests that the painting’s artist, Edvard Munch, wrote the secret message around 1895 Edvard Munch’s The Scream attracted intense criticism when it was first exhibited in Norway in 1895. Some viewers interpreted the open-mouthed central figure, who stands on a bridge in a sea of swirling color, as an embodiment of the artist’s own fragile mental health . Historians have long speculated that this controversy provoked a viewer to pencil a curious piece of graffiti on the top ...
Feb 24th, 2021 - Estimated at €5m to €8m, the work finds a distinctive pastoral side to the Paris neighbourhood An 1887 painting of Montmartre in Paris by Vincent Van Gogh is appearing on the market for the first time next month after belonging to the same French family for over a century. It is being sold on 25 March at Sotheby’s Impressionist and Modern Art sale in Paris in conjunction with the Parisian auction house Mirabaud Mercier. Titled Scène de rue à Montmartre (Impasse des deux frères et le ...
Feb 22nd, 2021 - The artist's plans for his 'Last Supper' were more exacting than many realized. An unpublished Salvador Dalí drawing is giving new insight into one of the Surrealist’s most famous paintings, The Sacrament of the Last Supper (1955), which is housed in the collection of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Collector Christopher Heath Brown, an oral and maxillofacial surgeon, owns the drawing and has collaborated with art historian Jean-Pierre Isbouts, a professor at California’s ...
Feb 19th, 2021 - 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. Pissarro predicted that Van Gogh 'would either go mad or leave the Impressionists far behind' Fresh evidence of Camille’s admiration for Vincent: an unpublished document reveals he owned the Dutch ...
Feb 11th, 2021 - We caught up with the gallerist on what's inside his personal collection. Gallerists are the first to tell you about that great new artist everyone is coveting. But eagle-eyed collectors often know to look beyond the gallery walls, to the back-room goodies being held back for the right client. But why not go one further? What’s in art dealer’s collection? We spoke with the London- and Hong Kong-based gallerist Ben Brown to find out just that. Brown was immersed in the art world from a young ...
Feb 11th, 2021 - If the French capital is "well worth a mass", as King Henri IV supposedly once said, so are its myriad churches stacked with overlooked treasures – all the more so in the bleak age of Covid. Had le bon roi Henri lived in present times, he may well have decided Paris was worth a miss. With the city’s cherished museums, theatres, cinemas and concert halls all desperately shut , and a “not-even-in-wartime” 6pm curfew in place, it’s currently all work and no play for most Parisians, holed ...
Feb 11th, 2021 - German art collector and dealer Helga de Alvear is gifting her entire collection to a Spanish region. This spring, a city in Spain will become a European art destination when it opens a major expansion to one of the continent’s leading collections of contemporary art. German art collector and dealer Helga de Alvear, who is also one of the founders of the fair ARCOMadrid, has amassed a formidable collection of 3,000 contemporary artworks over four decades. She has gifted the collection—in ...
Feb 10th, 2021 - In a compelling new HBO documentary, film-maker Sam Pollard speaks to prominent creatives to tell the struggle and success of African American art “I get up at 7.30 in the morning and then I’m at my computer working, thinking about new ideas, pushing along the projects that I’m involved in,” 70-year-old Sam Pollard explains. The documentary film-maker, as an editor, frequently collaborated with Spike Lee on films such as Mo’ Better Blues, 4 Little Girls and Bamboozled. His storied ...
Feb 10th, 2021 - Picture: The Guardian Posted by Adam Busiakiewicz: The arts columnist Jonathan Jones of the Guardian has asked the above question in his recent review on the Rijksmuseum's new exhibition Slavery . Jones describes the shock inclusion of Rembrandt's 1634 full length portraits of Marten Soolmans and Oopjen Coppit (pictured): But there’s a deeply troubling side to this couple’s wealth – and Rembrandt may have wanted us to register that there was something amiss. Soolmans was heir to one of ...
