Displaying items by tag: commission

Since it opened in 1987, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Iris and Gerald B. Cantor Roof Garden has sprouted all manner of art – giant safety pin to balloon dog to towering bamboo village – much of it newly made or conceived for the warm-weather space, overlooking Central Park and sitting atop one of the world’s best collections of art.

A new fountain has been unveiled at Versailles for the first time in over 300 years. Made from 2,000 gilded glass orbs, Les Belles Dances (2015) by French sculptor Jean-Michel Othoniel is a permanent commissioned artwork designed to honor King Louis XIV.

Collaborating with landscape architect Louis Benech, Othoniel's design was influenced by the King's personal dance instruction book.

Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art recently acquired Maya’s Quilt of Life, 1989, (acrylic on canvas and painted, dyed and pieced fabrics) by Faith Ringgold, from the art collection of the late author and activist, Maya Angelou. The work hung in Angelou’s home and was commissioned by Oprah Winfrey for Angelou’s 61st birthday.

Ringgold is well-known for her painted story quilts, which unite a tradition of representational painting with the rich history of quilting in the African-American community. The border of Maya’s Quilt of Life is made from pieced-together fabric that frames Angelou, who is surrounded by flowers in her signature patterned African dress and head wrap.

In 1872, painter Albert Bierstadt finished "View From Donner Lake, California," which encompassed the mile-high waters of the Sierra Nevada with the sinewy wagon trails and the muscular, ramrod-straight tracks of the newly built transcontinental railroad.

But a funny thing happened in a different Bierstadt painting finished a year later. In "Donner Lake From the Summit," a celebrated 10-foot-wide oil-on-canvas commissioned by Collis P. Huntington, the wagon trail practically disappears. The railroad tracks are barely there too, at first glance possibly mistaken for a fallen tree. The emphasis is all warm sun, fluffy clouds and glorious terrain, untouched by man.

The Victoria and Albert Museum in London announced that its Europe 1600–1815 galleries would finally open on December 9 following a £12.5m restoration, with £4.75m from the Heritage Lottery Fund. The project has been delayed due to a “complicated build”, according to a museum spokesman.

The new display of over 1,100 artefacts, from the museum’s collection of 17th- and 18th-century European art and design, will be complemented by a new commission from Cuban artists Los Carpinteros.

Collecting scrimshaw is a dicey hobby, given the prevalence of forgeries in the field — plastic resin copies are known as fakeshaw.

The welding supply magnate Thomas Mittler, who died in 2010 at 67, bought whale bone and tooth carvings with the guidance of scholars and dealers, including Nina Hellman, who owns a marine antiques store on Nantucket. Her new book, “Through the Eyes of a Collector: The Scrimshaw Collection of Thomas Mittler,” was published by Charlotte Mittler, the widow of Mr. Mittler; he had long planned to commission a publication about his hundreds of acquisitions.

The J. Paul Getty Museum has just acquired an important early sculpture by the Baroque master Bernini: a marble bust of Pope Paul V that many art historians did not believe still existed.

Originally commissioned by Cardinal Scipione Borghese, the nephew of Pope Paul V, in 1621, the sculpture was the 23-year-old artist’s first documented portrait of a pope — a subject that would define his career.

Visitors to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Roof Garden this summer might suppose at first that the maintenance crew has been tearing up the terrace’s paving stones in search of a leak. Displaced slabs are stacked next to rectangular cavities exposing underlying dirt where puddles and rivulets have gathered. In fact, the apparent disarray belongs to an installation by the French Conceptualist Pierre Huyghe, an untitled work commissioned by the Met for its annual Roof Garden show.

A watch given to Sir Winston Churchill to celebrate victory in the Second World War, proclaiming him a “happy warrior” and likening him to St George, is to be sold at auction for up to £100,000.

The watch, commissioned by a group of “prominent Swiss citizens”, was one of four given to leaders including Charles de Gaulle, Joseph Stalin and Harry S. Truman, to commemorate VE Day.

The New-York Historical Society is to unveil Pablo Picasso's iconic painted theater curtain, commissioned for Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, Le Tricorne, in 1919. The masterpiece is the largest work by the Spanish born artist in America. It was donated by the Landmarks Conservancy to the New-York Historical Society and after considerable conservation will be on view to the public, later this spring. The Le Tricorne curtain was installed as a tapestry for 55 years at the Four Seasons Restaurant in the Mies van der Rohe designed, modernist, Seagram Building, in New York City.