Displaying items by tag: Impressionist

The New York evening sales concluded tonight with the Impressionist and modern sale at Christie’s, which racked up $145.5 million, well above its low estimate of $108.8 million—a quite successful tally accrued during a slow, steady waltz through a list of 59 relatively low-priced lots. The almost complete lack of any sky-high estimates—only two lots had valuations that passed into eight figures—allowed attendees to raise their paddles early and often, and a solid 83 percent of the cautiously priced works found buyers.

On the heels of its historic sale, "The Artist's Muse," which combined Impressionist and contemporary masterworks, and achieved a new $170 million Modigliani record, Christie's focused this evening's sale purely on postwar and contemporary art.

The sale realized $331.8 million compared with expectations of roughly $320 million. While, overall, it was a solid night, it was clear that the real fireworks had already passed; they happened the previous night.

The Barnes Foundation — which is still feeling out its new identity in downtown Philadelphia after relocating in 2012 from its original home in the suburb of Merion, Pa. — announced Thursday that it had chosen Sylvie Patry, a longtime curator at the Musée D’Orsay in Paris, to be its new chief curator and deputy director for collections and exhibitions.

Ms. Patry, 46, is a specialist in Impressionist and Post-Impressionism, which is the strength of the Barnes’s collection, built by Albert C. Barnes, a willful and eccentric pharmaceutical tycoon, and opened in 1922.

Flash on French Impressionism and you’re likely to see gauzy noon landscapes, or a steam-choked Gare Saint-Lazare, or just clouds of flickering paint strokes like molecules flying apart. Yet if you visited the Impressionist show in Paris in 1877, you would have found a few things that countered such expectations: realistic paintings of a new Paris of luxury high-rises as blank as mausoleums and of ruler-straight boulevards running back into infinite space.

The name of the artist attached to these pictures, Gustave Caillebotte, was one you might even have heard of at the time. He had already made a splash in the previous year’s exhibition.

An oil painting thought to have been created by French Impressionist Claude Monet has been proven to be genuine through scientific testing.

"A Haystack in the Evening Sun" had not previously been authenticated because the work is largely unknown and the artist's signature is covered by paint.

However researchers at the University of Jyvaskyla in Finland uncovered the signature using a hyperspectral camera.

The major spring auctions in New York are still more than a month away, but clues are starting to emerge about potential heavyweights. Earlier this week, Christie’s said that it plans to ask around $40 million for the 90-work estate of former Goldman Sachs chairman John Whitehead on May 4-5, including Impressionist and modern pieces by Claude Monet and Amedeo Modigliani.

On Friday, Sotheby’s said it plans to seek even more—around $50 million—on May 12.

A new record price for an artwork, nearly $300 million, may have been achieved with the sale of a Paul Gauguin canvas by a Swiss collector. The buyer is rumored to be the Qatar Museums.

The seller, Rudolf Staechelin, a retired Sotheby's executive who now lives in Basel, confirmed the sale this afternoon to the "New York Times," but declined to identify the buyer or disclose the price. The 1892 oil painting, "Nafea Faa Ipoipo (When Will You Marry?)," is one of over 20 works in his collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art. Prior to the sale, the Gauguin canvas had been on loan to the Kunstmuseum in Basel for close to fifty years.

The National Gallery is to undergo a major renovation, thanks to a grant award from the Maurice Wohl Charitable Foundation. The National Gallery is the joint winner* of the Wohl Arts Competition, a highly competitive award from the Maurice Wohl Charitable Foundation for a major capital landmark project in the arts in the UK. The competition is taking place to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the philanthropy of the late Maurice and Vivienne Wohl.

The National Gallery share of the £5 million grant will facilitate vital restoration works in the 19th Century and Impressionist galleries (Rooms 41-46), part of the original 1830s Wilkins building.

The former director of the Barnes Foundation is crossing over to the commercial side of the art world. Derek Gillman, who led the Barnes’s controversial move from its original home in Merion, Pennsylvania to downtown Philadelphia, joined Christie’s on January 5 as chairman and senior vice president of Impressionist and Modern art, the Americas.

Gillman joins the auction house in the midst of a management shake-up. Last month, Christie’s chief executive officer Steven Murphy was replaced by Patricia Barbizet.

“175 Masterworks To Celebrate 175 Years of Photography: Property from Joy of Giving Something Foundation" auction held at Sotheby's New York on December 11th and 12th, broke the world record for a photography auction. The sale was drawn from a collection gathered by the late American financier Howard Stein. The auction grossed the grand sum of $21,325,063, or £13,591,629 - beating its presale estimate of $13–20 million, or £8.2 - £12.7 million. The sale greatly surpassed the previous record, set in 2006 by a Sotheby's sale of photographs from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which reached the total of $15 million, or £9.5 million.

The auction also set a number of artist's records. The top lot, an impressionistic view of Venice by Alvin Langdon Coburn ("Shadows and Reflections, Venice," 1905) fetched the staggering sum of $965,000, or £614,726.