At first it might seem strange that the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam would buy a seascape by Manet, but stranger still is that there are only two other Manets in Dutch museums. This week the museum announced the purchase of Manet's Pier at Boulogne, 1869. The museum bought the painting from an unidentified French collection for nearly $7 million in public and private money. Giraud Pissarro Ségalot, dealers with offices in New York and Paris, acted as agents for the seller.
Dolores Olmedo Patiño, the combative Mexican art collector who turned her hacienda into a museum devoted to paintings by Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, died in Mexico City on Saturday. Her age was a matter of debate, but she used a birth date that would make her eighty-eight.
The art world was in revolt recently after the design selected for the £3 million memorial fountain to Diana, Princess of Wales, was described as bland and an embarrassment to Britain. American landscape artist Kathryn Gustafson and London architect Neil Porter were nominated to create a large, water-filled, stone ring in Hyde Park, ending five years of dithering since the princess's death. A committee had been unable to choose between Gustafson and Anish Kapoor, the Turner Prize–winning British sculptor, who proposed a dome of water, and suggested the two designs should be exhibited for the
On a gray day in a gray summer, the top galleries at the Royal Academy in London were shimmering with a heat haze of color, a great private art collection that has never been on public display in Europe before. The blazing paintings include a sensational Matisse, a whole wall of Kandinsky, another of Klee, along with works by Braque, Modigliani, Cézanne, Monet, and Derain. Many of the individual works are well known from earlier exhibitions, but the collectors are not. “Color! Light! Happiness!” cried Werner Merzbacher, who, along with his wife, Gabrielle, owns the collection.
Largely ignored in their lifetime, many women artists in Australia are now shining in the saleroom, reports Geoff Maslen.
Sotheby’s is facing yet another fraud investigation over a record-setting £49 million Rubens painting that was sold by an Austrian woman earlier this month. Public prosecutors in Austria have launched an inquiry after they were handed a dossier from an anonymous source claiming the company had conspired with the painting’s owner to conceal the true identity of the Old Master.
A few days ago the House of Representatives voted by a comfortable margin not merely to approve the Bush administration's 2003 allocation of $110 million for the National Endowment for the Arts, but to tack an extra $10 million onto it. One House Republican said federal funding of the NEA has become a “nonissue” because Congress is “very satisfied” with the endowment's recent performance. Today, the agency funds mostly large institutions and schools. Few artists and writers receive any direct funding.
A stolen Chagall painting, which was held at ransom by thieves who demanded peace in the Middle East, has been returned to its Russian home. The $1 million painting, Study for Over Vitebsk, was stolen in June 2001 from the Jewish Museum in New York, where it had been on loan.
A few years ago, the murmurs started. Artists were discovering the attractions of the South Bronx: cheap rent, good subway access, and, especially, vacant industrial space. A few dozen artists arrived, but the expected explosion never occurred. But that may change. Carnegie Management Corporation, a Brooklyn developer, is putting the finishing touches on the conversion of the Estey Piano Company factory into 155 live-in artists' studios, renting for $950 to $1,700 a month. The first eighteen units in the long-vacant factory should be available next month.
From west to east, art showcases on Long Island are offering an eclectic mix of aesthetic experiences. Drawing on their own collections, the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton and the Guild Hall of East Hampton have assembled group shows, the first focused on landscape, the other on artists who have contributed to the Hamptons' reputation as a summertime destination for modern sophisticates.
Robert Giard, a photographer who took hundreds of portraits of gay and lesbian writers, died on July 16 en route to Chicago. He was sixty-two and lived in Amagansett, New York. He was traveling by bus from Minneapolis and died of what appeared to be a heart attack, said his companion, Jonathan Silin.
After more than a decade of legislative setbacks, plans for the first national museum focusing on the history of African Americans are moving a step closer toward giving visitors to the nation's capital a different perspective on American history, organizers say.