Displaying items by tag: Modern Art

Scholars tend to seek out the Morgan Library & Museum’s archives as a place to research old masters and 19th-century drawings, or to peek at the letters that modern masters like Chagall and Dubuffet wrote to the art dealer Pierre Matisse. But a recent gift from the Roy Lichtenstein estate will now make the Morgan a destination for classic contemporary artists, too.

While organizing the Morgan’s 2010 exhibition “Roy Lichtenstein: The Black-and-White Drawings, 1961-1968,” Isabelle Dervaux, curator of modern and contemporary drawings, and William M. Griswold, the Morgan’s director, got to know Dorothy Lichtenstein, the artist’s widow. It is because of that friendship, Mr. Griswold said, that Ms. Lichtenstein recently donated a group of sketchbooks and drawings from her husband’s estate to the Morgan.

Records tumbled this season in the highest-grossing flagship summer auctions that Sotheby’s London has ever seen. Together, sales in the four key categories of Old Masters, Impressionist & Modern, Contemporary Art and ‘Treasures’ totalled a record £360 million - with top estimates repeatedly smashed and record numbers of participants engaging in the sales.

The strong results were fuelled by a burgeoning interest from collectors from the new markets - many of whom are making their presence ever more strongly felt in Sotheby’s London salerooms, their interest constantly expanding into an ever broader range of fields.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is beefing up its glass collection with a gift of 44 works by the Italian architect Carlo Scarpa from the collection of David Landau and his wife Marie-Rose Kahane. The donation is expected to have a “transformative impact on our holdings of 20th-century glass and design”, says Sheena Wagstaff, the museum’s chairman of modern and contemporary art, in a statement.

Scarpa created the objects during his 15-year collaboration with Venini Glassworks in Venice between 1932 and 1947. Together, the architect and Paolo Venini, the founder of the glass company, modernised glassblowing and pioneered innovations in color, form and technique. The 44 works from the Landau and Kahane collection made their US debut earlier this year in the Met’s exhibition “Venetian Glass by Carlo Scarpa: The Venini Company, 1932-1947.”

To commemorate the 50th anniversary of Andy Warhol’s iconic “Empire,” the experimental film will be shown continuously in the Fifth Avenue lobby of New York City’s Empire State Building. The screening, which will take place throughout the month of July, will be complemented by images of Warhol’s art and details of his life and filmmaking.

“Empire” is a silent black-and-white film that consists of eight hours and five minutes of continuous slow motion footage of the Empire State Building. Filming began on the night of July 25-26, 1964, from 8:10pm to 2:30am from the 41st floor of the Time-Life Building in the Rockefeller Foundation office. Punctuated by the Empire State Building’s changing lights and the sky above, “Empire” is hailed as an avant-garde masterpiece, challenging viewers with its daunting running time, yet raising profound questions about time, subject, and personal reflection. When explaining the film, Warhol said, “I never liked the idea of picking out certain scenes and pieces of time and putting them together, because...it’s not like life...what I liked was chunks of time all together, every real moment.”

An enormous abstract sculpture, a sailboat of sorts, rests on a pedestal at the intersection of Beverly and San Vicente boulevards in West Hollywood. Its dark, carbon-fiber sails seem to billow in the wind, and corkscrew spirals of stainless steel, like twirling gusts of air, dance around it. Cedars-Sinai Medical Center rises up behind it, like towering, angry waves.

Frank Stella, the abstract artist who made the piece, circles it on foot, viewing it for the first time since it was installed. In a dapper sports coat and brown fedora, the 78-year-old New York artist — a fixture in the modern-art world for more than 50 years and one of the fathers of Minimalism — assesses the sculpture while in perpetual motion. He speaks quickly, pausing only to look up at the piece from different angles, hand on hip, squinting into the sunlight.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art presents Expressionism in Germany and France: From Van Gogh to Kandinsky ( on view through September 14, 2014), an exhibition that sheds new light on the extraordinary response of artists in Germany and France to key developments in modern art in the early 20th century. For the first time in a major museum exhibition, Expressionism is presented not as a distinctly German style but as an international movement in which artists in Germany and France responded with various aesthetic approaches to modern masters such as Vincent van Gogh, Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, and Paul Gauguin, among others. Over 40 artists—including Wassily Kandinsky, Emil Nolde, Gabrielle Münter, Franz Marc, Robert Delaunay, and Pierre Bonnard—are represented in over 90 paintings and 45 works on paper, in addition to approximately 30 ephemera objects.

“Expressionism in Germany and France offers a unique opportunity to observe the ways that a generation of artists was influenced by some of the greatest names in modern art history,” says exhibition curator Timothy O. Benson. “Our visitors will gain insight into the culturally rich cosmopolitan milieu established by the many exhibitions, collectors, gallerists, critics, and not least the artists of the time (many of whom traveled between Paris and Germany) and how this cultural atmosphere transcended national borders.”

A court here on Wednesday issued a ruling that permits the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation to display art as it sees fit in the Venetian palazzo given to it by the wealthy collector Peggy Guggenheim.

In a 16-page decision, the Paris tribunal rejected legal claims made by a group of her descendants that the foundation was bound to display Guggenheim’s vast collection of modern art the way she had originally presented it in her home.

Her family — seven grandsons and great-grandsons based in France — vowed to appeal after the tribunal dismissed their demands to revoke Guggenheim’s donation to the foundation unless the displays of Cubist, Surrealist and abstract postwar art were returned to their original state without additions of contemporary works.

Barbara Hepworth’s sculpture Figure for Landscape (1960) sold for a record-setting £4,170,500 / ($7,085,680) at Christie’s sale of modern British and Irish art in London on Wednesday evening. Hepworth’s previous record was set at the same Christie’s sale in July of last year for Curved Form (Bryher II) (1961), which was sold for £2,413,875 ($3,604,412), according to the artnet Price Database.

The sculpture, which was estimated to fetch £1–2 million, was consigned by Norway’s Kunsthall Stavanger, which is on the brink of closure due to lacking public funds.

Christie’s failed to sell 33 percent of the artworks offered in its Impressionist and modern art evening sale in London as collectors rebelled against aggressive estimates and subpar quality.

Yesterday’s tally of 85.8 million pounds ($145.7 million) was about 30 percent lower than rival Sotheby’s (BID) sale the night before. Of the 60 lots offered, 20 failed to find buyers, including works by Pablo Picasso, Piet Mondrian and Alberto Giacometti.

“There was a big difference in quality between the two sales,” said London-based art dealer Pilar Ordovas. “There were many works which would have been better suited for a day sale.”

If you're shelling out $38 million for a property, you'd hope there would be a few bonuses thrown in.

Thankfully Phil Maloof, the former New Mexico state senator and a member of the wealthy Maloof family, has got you covered - adding Dali and Picasso paintings to the already extensive inventory of his breathtaking Las Vegas penthouse.

He reportedly bought the 27,000-square-foot Palms Place penthouse in 2008 for a mere $4.5 million, but he has since completely refurbished the home and deck in a breathtaking feat of opulence.

The apartment, which takes over the entire 59th floor of Palms Place tower, has 360 degree unobstructed views of the entire Las Vegas valley from decks that can fit up to 200 people.