Displaying items by tag: Velazquez

The long-awaited art exhibition Spanish Masters from the Hermitage. The World of El Greco, Ribera, Zurbarán, Velázquez, Murillo & Goya opened at the Hermitage Amsterdam on Saturday 28 November 2015. The exhibition includes more than sixty superior paintings and a rich collection of graphic works and applied arts masterpieces. Never before has the Netherlands hosted such a comprehensive survey of Spanish art, with work that is hardly represented in Dutch museum collections.

They arrive in crates and boxes and date back centuries. They carry secrets and stories of a bygone era. They’re here for a while, and then they’re gone.

Such is the case with the recent flurry of shipments to the Meadows Museum at Southern Methodist University, where the institution founded by Algur Meadows and dedicated to Spanish art celebrates its 50th anniversary at the same time the school is turning 100.

The Frick Collection has always been rich in Spanish paintings, particularly works by Velázquez, El Greco and Goya. The museum’s founder, Henry Clay Frick, bought three canvases by El Greco on his travels to Spain, and they currently hang together as part of “El Greco in New York,” an exhibition organized in collaboration with the Frick, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Hispanic Society to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the artist’s death.

But in 1904, before Frick acquired any of these well-known paintings, he bought a self-portrait by the 17th-century Baroque artist Bartolomé Esteban Murillo.

Bodies and Shadows: Caravaggio and His Legacy opened on Sunday at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). The exhibition is devoted to the Italian painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, (1517-1610) one of the most historically influential artists, best known for his use of lighting as well as his sensitivity to the physical and emotional state of his subjects.

The show at LACMA will feature an unprecedented eight works by Carvaggio himself. Fifty additional paintings will explore his influence on painters from France, Spain, and the Netherlands including Georges de La Tour, Gerrit van Honthorst, Velazquez, and Simon Vouet. The exhibition will be on view through February 10, 2013.

Bodies and Shadows was co-organized by LACMA, the Musee Fabree, the Musee des Augustins, and the Wadsworth Athenaeum Museum of Art. All four museums are members of the consortium the French Regional American Museum Exchange. The exhibition will travel to the Wadsworth Athenaeum after LACMA from March 8, 2013 through June 15, 2013.

165 years ago, the Knoedler Gallery opened its doors in New York and went on to help create some of the country’s most celebrated collections including those of Paul Mellon, Henry Clay Frick, and Robert Sterling Clark. Throughout the years, top-notch works by artists such as van Gogh, Manet, Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent, Louise Bourgeois, and Willem de Kooning passed through the gallery. When the Soviet government sold hundreds of paintings from the State Hermitage Museum in Leningrad in the 1930s, they chose to work with Knoedler to sell paintings by masters like Rembrandt, Raphael, and Velazquez.

Knoedler’s exemplary past is often forgotten as the gallery’s present has been mired in lawsuits and accusations that the company’s former president, Ann Freedman, was in the business of selling fakes. Last year, Knoedler Gallery closed its doors for good.

This week, Los Angeles’ Getty Research Institute announced that it had bought the Knoedler Gallery archive. Spanning from around 1850 to 1971, the archive includes stock books, sales books, a photo archive and files of correspondence, including letters from artists and collectors, some with illustrations. The Getty was interested in Knoedler’s archive because it offers an expansive glimpse into the history of collecting and the art market in the United States and Europe from the mid-19^th century to modern times.

The archive was purchased from Knoedler’s owner, Michael Hammer, for an undisclosed amount. Meticulously preserved, the archive will be available to scholars and digitized for online research after the Getty catalogues and conserves it all.

Portraits by Velazquez and Goya are the main attractions in a 55.6-million-pound ($86.5 million) series of Old Master auctions in London next month that have struggled to lure big-ticket works by major artists.

The upper estimate for these biannual Part 1 sales at Christie’s International, Sotheby’s and Bonhams is 22 percent lower than last year, reflecting owners’ reluctance to sell in the current economic climate.

The auction market for historic paintings is heavily reliant on discerning collectors from Europe, where confidence has been knocked by sovereign debt concerns. New international buyers, meanwhile, have been more attracted to modern and contemporary works.

“People are nervous about selling at the moment,” said Andrew McKenzie, an Old Master specialist at Bonhams. “They don’t think the economy is very good and are worried their works won’t fetch high prices. I’m confident the good pictures will still do well.”

Bonhams’s most valuable lot is a discovery, rather than a discretionary sale. The company is offering a newly identified Velazquez, valued at 2 million pounds to 3 million pounds, in its Dec. 7 auction. The head-and-shoulders portrait of an unknown middle-aged man was found among a group of paintings entered for sale at the company’s Oxford branch in August 2010. It had formerly been owned by the obscure 19th-century U.K. artist Matthew Shepperson.

Rare Find

The well-preserved canvas was identified as a Velazquez by the Dublin-based scholar Dr. Peter Cherry. It is thought to date from about 1630.

“I’d be surprised if it doesn’t sell for at least 10 million pounds,” said the London-based dealer Charles Beddington. “A collector who is really serious about art should want to own a Velazquez and there won’t be another one coming along anytime soon.”

Goya’s portrait of Don Juan Lopez de Robredo, the splendidly waistcoated embroiderer to King Carlos IV of Spain, is valued by Christie’s at 4 million pounds to 6 million pounds in its Dec. 6 sale. Offered by a Spanish collector, it last appeared at auction in 1992 when it failed to sell.

Quality oils by Velazquez and Goya rarely appear on the market and no work by either artist has sold for more than 10 million pounds at auction.