The National Gallery in London may not have stopped the Northumberland Raphael from being California-bound (yet), but in the meantime, they have uncovered an early painting by Sandro Botticelli, writes Paul Jeromack in the Art Newspaper. Previously catalogued as a work by a “Follower of Botticelli, c. 1490–1500”, the panel was purchased (as a Filippino Lippi) in 1858 by the National Gallery's then director, Sir Charles Eastlake.
For more than two years, a mural by German-born artist and colorist Josef Albers, which had adorned the lobby of the MetLife Building on Park Avenue since it was completed forty years ago, has been sitting in storage, writes Carol Vogel in the New York Times. But Manhattan, as Albers called the piece, may come to life again, in an exact replication, at the New School University.
Philadelphia's Potamkin collection of American art, one of the best of its kind in private hands, is being broken up, writes Edward J. Sozanski in the Philadelphia Inquirer. The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts will receive Marsden Hartley's Flower Abstraction, 1914, Georgia O'Keeffe's Red Canna, 1923, and Maurice Prendergast's Promenade, 1912–13, among other works. The Potamkin heirs and Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, Meyer Potamkin's alma mater, will receive the rest of the collection.
The British government was urged last night to give a direct grant to save Raphael's Madonna of the Pinks for the National Gallery, and to provide an extra thirty million pounds a year to stop the loss to Britain of significant works of art, writes Maeve Kennedy in The Guardian.
Sir John Guinness, chairman of the culture ministry's reviewing committee on the exports of works of art, described a reception held to mark the fiftieth anniversary of his committee as not a celebration but a “funeral wake for those lost.”
A group of William Blake watercolors that were found in a Glasgow secondhand-book shop have sold for five million pounds (eight million dollars), reports the BBC News. The nineteen works illustrate Robert Blair's Gothic poem “The Grave.”
In Arizona, a legislative committee has recommended eliminating the state arts agency and its 5.1-million-dollar annual budget, writes Stephen Kinzer in the New York Times. Goveror James E. McGreevey of New Jersey, who is grappling with a five-billion-dollar deficit, has proposed cutting the entire eighteen-million-dollar budget of his state's Council on the Arts. Missouri is also planning to eliminate its entire arts budget.
“The 2002 Slate 60,” the annual list of charitable gifts and pledges from the country's top philanthropists, totaled $4.6 billion, less than half of 2001's total of $12.7 billion, writes Laurie Snyder in Slate.com. Walter H. Annenberg topped this year's list with a bequest of one billion dollars worth of art to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Ruth Lilly, heiress to the Eli Lilly pharmaceutical fortune, came in at No. 2 with a $520 million pledge to various arts organizations, including a $100 million gift to Poetry magazine.
London's annual Contemporary, Modern, and Impressionist sales, held earlier this month, were packed, and more than 80 percent of lots were sold at firm, if not striking, market estimates, writes Andrew Renton in the Evening Standard. But the best of the “turning” and profit-taking has gone, and the contemporary collectors have stocked up on the prizes they missed first time round.
After a year of restoration and investigation, staff at Scotland's National Gallery have been able to shed light on a work Van Dyck wanted no one to see. Underneath the canvas of St Sebastian Bound for Martyrdom is a previous work, also of Saint Sebastian and almost an exact copy of a Van Dyck that hangs in the Louvre, writes Kirsty Scott in The Guardian. Traces of dust under the top layers of paint suggest that the seventeenth-century painter had hung his original work for some time before deciding it had to be redone in a different style.
A British family whose grandparents were murdered by the Nazis are to sell art and antiques worth two million pounds (three million dollars) in one of the biggest sales of war-looted art, writes Will Bennett in The Telegraph. The works of art were part of a huge collection originally amassed by Eugen Gutmann, who founded the Dresdner Bank in Germany. The Commission for Looted Art in Europe took up the family's case, and last year 233 paintings and antiques were returned.
In Dresden, museum administrators and curators are now complaining that Saxony's regional government has refused to provide them with a safe place to store their art after this summer's flood, writes Alan Riding in the New York Times. One positive consequence of the near disaster, however, was fresh recognition of Dresden's art collections. A selection of exceptional works from the Zwinger Palace old-masters collection was first presented in Hamburg and is now on exhibit at the Altes Museum in Berlin through February 28. About fifty Dresden masterpieces will then go on display at the Royal
Blockbusters can be the salvation for exhibitors, and media giant Clear Channel is eager to provide them, writes Chris Jones in the Chicago Tribune. “Treasures of the Vatican,” which includes 350 pieces drawn from the Vatican museum's collection, has secured berths at such institutions as the San Diego Museum of Art and the Museum of Art, Ft. Lauderdale (the Art Institute of Chicago passed on the exhibit, but would not disclose the reasons). Earlier this month, Clear Channel's “Chicano Visions: American Painters on the Verge” began a fifteen-city tour, originating at the National Hispanic Cultural