Displaying items by tag: Modern Art

The granddaughter of one of the world’s leading dealers of Modern and Impressionist art, whose collection was looted by the Nazis, is launching her own gallery on New York’s Upper East Side.

Marianne Rosenberg, a long time international finance lawyer, has signed a lease on a space measuring around 1,500 sq. ft in the ground floor of a townhouse on East 66th Street between Madison and Fifth Avenue, in what was formerly the home of the Dickinson Gallery. The gallery, Rosenberg & Co, is scheduled to open on March 7 and will focus on the secondary Modern market, and also work with contemporary artists.

The woman, carved from limestone, sits with her arms resting on her pulled-up legs and looks enigmatically ahead. She is regarded as one of Romania’s finest modernist artworks, yet the Bucharest government’s refusal to say whether it wants to buy her has left the €20m (£15m) sculpture in a murky legal limbo, and its owners unable to sell.

The statue, "The Wisdom of the Earth" by Constantin Brâncuși, has a history that reflects the tumult in its creator’s native land. First sold in 1911, it was confiscated by the communists in 1957 and became the subject of a lengthy legal battle after the fall of the dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu, ending in 2008 with it returned to the family of its original owner.

The show called “Sculpture in the Age of Donatello" opens tomorrow at the Museum of Biblical Art in New York, and Donatello's "Saint John the Evangelist," from around 1412, is one of its treasures. (Many experts can't imagine why such a masterpiece has made the risky trip from Florence without any scholarly motive, but that's a story for another day – and that I happen to have already written).

This sculpture may be from the "age of Donatello," but when seen up on a plinth in a modern museum, it could be that it has really become modern art.

Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art announces the opening of "Van Gogh to Rothko: Masterworks from the Albright-Knox Art Gallery," on view February 21 through June 1, 2015. The exhibition brings together 76 artworks by 73 influential artists from the late 19th century to the present, including Vincent van Gogh, Joán Miró, Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, and Mark Rothko. The works were selected from the collection of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, one of the finest collections of 20th century art in the country. General admission to the temporary exhibition is $10 and free to Members and youth under 18 years old.

“Crystal Bridges is one of only four venues to host the exhibition and we’re delighted to provide visitors a rare opportunity to share the gallery with some of the most prominent figures in art history. Albright-Knox is one of the oldest collecting institutions in the country—we’re grateful, as one of the youngest, to share these stunning works that helped shape the story of American art.” says Rod Bigelow, Crystal Bridges Executive Director.

As a technique for creating art, frottage is so closely identified with Surrealism, in general, and Max Ernst, in particular, that the link itself might be an example of the technique.

"Frottage" is French for "rubbing," and it rubbed off on the boisterous Surrealist movement that in the troubled decades between the two World Wars was dedicated to unleashing the creative potential of the unconscious mind. When a sheet of paper is laid over a textured surface and rubbed with pencil or pastel, unexpected and evocative shapes, forms and tonalities can be produced.

When Ruth Horwich, a fixture in Chicago’s art community for over fifty-five years, passed away in July 2014, she left behind an extraordinarily diverse and deeply personal art collection. Horwich and her husband, Leonard, began collecting art in the late 1950s, often focusing  on unknown and emerging artists. The couple amassed a fascinating collection that included works by Chicago Imagists, European Surrealists, and self-taught and folk artists. They also acquired many notable pieces by Robert Matta, Alexander Calder, and Jean Dubuffet.

In addition to growing her collection, Horwich was dedicated to providing key support to many Chicago art institutions.

Iruña to the Basques—the historical capital of the old Kingdom of Navarre in northern Spain, has hitherto been known mainly for its annual Festival of San Fermín, with its running-of-the-bulls immortalised by Ernest Hemingway in “The Sun Also Rises”, and as a stop on the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage route. Now the small city is seeking a different form of cultural validation, by taking a path well-trodden in Spain: the opening of a snazzy new museum.

The Museo Universidad de Navarra, tucked into a hillside outside the city center, is most obviously inspired by nearby Bilbao, where the Frank Gehry-designed Guggenheim has been breathing life into post-industrial torpor since 1997.

Alchemy, a large-scale, sumptuously-textured painting by the Abstract Expressionist Jackson Pollock has returned to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice after undergoing an extensive conservation. The work, one of Pollock’s earliest poured paintings, traveled to Florence’s Opificio delle Pietre Dure (Hard Stone Factory), where it underwent an analytical study, cleaning, and conservation. The painting’s surface, which features dense layers of enamel, alkyd, oil paint, twine, sand, and pebbles, had been dulled by dirt and grime that had accumulated over the years.

For the duration of the exhibition, Alchemy by Jackson Pollock: Discovering the Artist at Work, the painting is being presented without glass or plexiglas, providing an unprecedented look at the restored work’s astonishly vivid colors and sculptural surface. Visitors are guided through every technical aspect of the conservation process thanks to a multimedia installation that features video, 3D reproductions, touch-screens, interactive devices, and documentation and original items loaned from Pollock’s studio at the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center in Long Island.

Moderna Museet highlights Louise Bourgeois, one of the most important 20th and 21st-century sculptors. Her art serves as a bridge from Modernism and continues to exert its influence on contemporary artistic practices today. "Louise Bourgeois – I Have Been to Hell and Back" is the most comprehensive Swedish exhibition of Louise Bourgeois’s art to date. It demonstrates the width of her oeuvre and presents her captivating and varied body of work over seven decades. One-third of the pieces in the exhibition have never before been shown publicly. Before entering the exhibition, visitors will encounter her monumental work Maman, a gigantic spider sculpture, which is standing outside the museum on Skeppsholmen.

The art of Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) is complex, radical and full of subversive humour, danger and fear. She succeeds in formulating that which is hard to find words for, and her creative urge was intimately linked with her need to understand, imbuing her oeuvre with a compelling psychological dimension.

A man who tried to sell stolen paintings worth a fortune, including works by Marc Chagall and Diego Rivera, was sentenced Friday to more than four years in state prison.

Raul Espinoza pleaded no contest to one count of receiving property stolen in 2008 from the Encino home of an elderly couple, Los Angeles prosecutors said.

The whereabouts of a dozen modern paintings from the home of Anton and Susan Roland remained a mystery for more than six years until a Los Angeles police detective got a tip in September that someone in Europe was trying to broker a deal to sell the art.