BRITISH ARTISTS, ART FUND ON BEHALF OF TITIAN; SINGAPORE PRIZE WINNER ANNOUNCED
The Guardian reports that the campaign to save two Titian masterpieces received a boost yesterday after sixty of Britain’s leading artists called for them to be saved for the nation, and the Art Fund donated $1.7 million to the cause. Diana and Actaeon, considered one of the greatest paintings in private ownership, and its sister painting, Diana and Callisto, have been on public view in the National Gallery of Scotland as part of the Bridgewater collection since 1945 under a loan agreement. But the decision by their owner, the Duke of Sutherland, to sell them has led to fears that a sale on the open market could see the sixteenth-century paintings leave the country. The letter to The Times yesterday, signed by sixty renowned artists including Lucian Freud, David Hockney, Sir Peter Blake, Antony Gormley, and Paula Rego, said: “We applaud the partnership formed by the National Galleries of Scotland and the National Gallery in London in an effort to acquire the two pictures.” The Art Fund, an independent charity that raises money to save art for the public, has offered the $1.7 million grant toward the purchase of Diana and Actaeon, the largest donation given to a single work by the organization. “This painting can and must be saved,” said David Barrie, director of the Art Fund. “Today we have put our money on the table. Now others must come together if this extraordinarily important painting is to be kept where it belongs.”
In other news, Yeo Chee Kiong won the thirty-one-thousand-dollar inaugural APB Foundation Signature Art Prize for his installation A Day Without a Tree, originally shown last year at Singapore’s National Museum, writes Adam Majendie for Bloomberg. Yeo’s mixed-media work greeted visitors to the building with what looked like a large puddle of white paint dripping from the walls as the columns of the four-story-high atrium. The award has the highest cash prize in Southeast Asia and is sponsored by the Singapore Art Museum and Asia Pacific Breweries. “I tried to present something that you are not sure of,” he said in an interview today at the Singapore Art Museum. Yeo was chosen from a short list of twelve artists from the region, including Malaysian Ahmad Fuad B. Osman, China’s Zheng Bo, and India’s G. R. Iranna, who all won sixty-eight-hundred-dollar jurors’ choice awards. Mongolia’s Davaa Dorjderem won sixty-eight hundred dollars for the people’s choice award, selected by online voters.
