Displaying items by tag: claude monet

Major paintings by such artists as Pablo Picasso, Claude Monet, and Henri Matisse were stolen from Rotterdam’s Kunsthal Museum on Tuesday. The thieves, who ransacked the museum in the early hours of the morning made off with seven works that may total hundreds of millions of dollars.

The heist is the largest in years for the Netherlands and includes Picasso’s Tete d’Arlequin, Matisse’s La Liseuse en Blanc et Jaune, Monet’s Waterloo Bridge, London and Charing Cross Bridge, London, Gauguin’s Femme devant une fenetre ouverte, dite la Fiancee, Meyer de Haan’s Autoportrait, and Lucian Freud’s Woman with Eyes Closed.

The works belong to The Triton Collection, a private collection that is being shown to the public for the first time ever as part of the Museum’s 20^th anniversary celebration. The Triton Collection was assembled over a twenty-year period and includes 150 works of modern art spanning from the 19^th century to the present day.

The Kunsthal’s alarm went off at 3AM and Rotterdam police have secured evidence from the scene. The police are speaking with potential witnesses and investigators are looking into the security camera footage.

On November 5^th, the Cleveland Museum of Art will auction off one of its six Claude Monet paintings in New York. Wheat Field (1881) carries an estimated price of $5–$7 million and the museum hopes to use the funds from the sale to strengthen its early 20^th century European painting and sculpture collection, an area that has been lacking.

The Museum decided to auction Wheat Fields shortly after David Franklin was named the Museum’s director in 2010. Franklin did not think the painting could hold its own next to to the other five Monets in the museum’s collection including a widely admired Water Lily painting and the seminal, Red Kerchief.

Since Wheat Field was donated to the museum in 1947 as an unrestricted gift of Mrs. Henry White Cannon, the museum is able to sell the painting without fear of complaint from the donor’s family. The Museum would like to acquire a painting by The Scream artist, Edvard Munch, or Wassily Kandinsky, the pioneering Russian abstractionist, to help round out their collection.

The great-granddaughters of the German-Jewish painter Max Liebermann are growing impatient with Berlin museum authorities about two drawings from his collection they say were lost as a result of Nazi persecution.

The drawings by Adolph Menzel in the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin are among thousands of works that Liebermann’s heirs are trying to recover. Liebermann was not only one of the most famous German Impressionists; he was also a great collector. Works by Edouard Manet, Edgar Degas, Claude Monet and Auguste Renoir adorned his imposing home next to the Brandenburg Gate.

Forced to resign as honorary president of the Prussian Academy of Arts after the Nazis took power, Liebermann died isolated and embittered in 1935, leaving his estate to his widow. She sold some artworks to pay the rent and buy food and medicine before committing suicide in 1943.

“For the heirs, it’s difficult to understand why public institutions are so hesitant,” said Georg Castell of Heinichen Laudien von Nottbeck Rechtsanwaelte in Berlin, the lawyer representing the great-granddaughters. “Without cooperation from the museums, we can’t get very far.”

It is the finest collection of modern art anywhere outside Europe and the US, boasting works by Jackson Pollock, Francis Bacon, Andy Warhol, Edvard Munch, René Magritte and Mark Rothko.

But the pieces have been stacked in the basement of Tehran's Museum of Contemporary Art for more than 30 years, gathering dust in storage. Censors in Iran classed some as un-Islamic, pornographic or too gay, and they have never been shown in public. Others have been displayed only once or twice.

But now a number of the collection's paintings are on show for the first time in Tehran as part of the museum's Pop Art & Op Art exhibition, featuring works by Warhol, David Hockney, Roy Lichtenstein, Victor Vasarely, Richard Hamilton and Jasper Johns.

"Many of the works in the exhibition are shown for the first time," Hasan Noferesti, the museum's director for art programmes, told the Mehr news agency. "The exhibition aims to show the evolution of these artistic movements."

More than 100 pieces from the museum's remarkable collection are on display, according to Mehr, along with a series of works from Mexico that have been dedicated to the museum in commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the Mexican revolution and the 200th anniversary of the country's independence.

James Rosenquist, Jim Dine, Larry Rivers and RB Kitaj are among other artists whose works are in the exhibition, which runs until mid-August.

Iran's unique hidden treasure was bought before the Islamic revolution, under the supervision of Farah Pahlavi, the former queen of Iran, who fled the country with the late shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in 1979.

The 38-year reign of the shah, self-proclaimed kings of kings, came to an end after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned from exile to Tehran receiving a hero's welcome and founded the Islamic republic.

The collection includes Pollock's Mural on Indian Red Ground, considered to be one of his most important works and estimated to be worth more than $250m, as well as important pieces by Picasso, Van Gogh, Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec, Degas, Whistler and Marcel Duchamp.

There are even pieces by artists whom the former empress met in person, including the Russian-French painter Marc Chagall and the English sculptor Henry Moore. The collection is thought to be worth more than $2.5bn.