Displaying items by tag: oil paintings

Currently on exhibit at the Fruitlands Art Gallery is “Hidden Hudson,” a display of 35 of the 100 or so Hudson River School landscape paintings in the museum’s permanent collection. The adjective “hidden” describes the fact that these particular oil paintings have not been shown to the public for many years, and their creators are lesser known or actually unknown artists.

Only a short time remains for a special exhibition of the work of American modernist Gershon Benjamin (1899-1985), a Romanian-born, Montreal-educated artist remembered as an Expressionist for his individualistic style and use of color. The exhibition, Gershon Benjamin: Modern Master features more than 60 portraits, still lifes, landscapes and city scenes in oil, watercolor and charcoal—all representing more than seven decades of work.

Benjamin was part of a 1920s New York scene of progressive artists who favored European modernism to the popular American Scene and Regionalist art of the day.

A New Hampshire man who admitted transporting five stolen N.C. Wyeth oil paintings to California, where four of them were sold to a high-end pawn shop for $100,000, is scheduled to be sentenced Tuesday in U.S. District Court.

Lawrence Estrella, 65, of Manchester, New Hampshire, waived indictment and pleaded guilty to interstate transportation of stolen property in April. Estrella was arrested Nov. 23, 2014, in Los Angeles by FBI agents, according to court documents.

Nineteen major paintings lent from the private collection of Thelma and Melvin Lenkin of Chevy Chase, Md., are on view at the Smithsonian American Art Museum through Aug. 16. Mary Cassatt’s renowned “Reading ‘Le Figaro’” is joined by major oil paintings by George Bellows, Martin Johnson Heade, John Singer Sargent, John Sloan, William Glackens, John La Farge, Everett Shinn and others. These artworks have been installed on the second-floor galleries of the museum within the chronological flow of the museum’s permanent collection to create a narrative around the excitement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries in America, a “coming-of-age” period in American art. Many of the works are on public view for the first time.

“I showed the America I knew,” Norman Rockwell once declared. His America, of course, is the one many of us know and love. We recognize in his famous images the energetic and optimistic folks who are emblematic of this nation’s spirit.

For more than 60 years, this lanky, pipe-smoking fellow, who had the air of a gawky clerk in a country store, set out his vision of this country on magazine covers and illustrations.

More than 40 paintings, drawings and birthday cards by Frank Auerbach, all of them owned by his friend and admirer Lucian Freud, have gone on public display as a group before they are dispersed to collections around the UK.

In May it was announced that Freud's estate had offered the 15 oil paintings and 29 works on paper by Auerbach, one of Britain's greatest living artists, to the government in lieu of around £16m of inheritance tax.

Because the bequest is so large and valuable it is being split up with museums and galleries now bidding for different works and groupings of works. Before that happens all the works are being displayed together at Tate Britain.

A gifted, restless, in many ways likable artist, Jamie Wyeth is the subject of a retrospective — his first in more than 30 years — at the Museum of Fine Arts. The show, which was curated by Elliot Bostwick Davis, the museum’s chair of the Art of the Americas, is full of incidental fascinations. But is it a body of work worthy of such lavish treatment in one of the world’s great museums?

I’m scratching my head. Wyeth, who has just turned 68, can paint. He can draw. He has lived an interesting and impressive life. But what’s missing from this show, which covers six decades and is made up of more than 100 oils, watercolors, drawings, and even a couple of humorous tableaux vivant, is a sense that it all adds up to something original — something that goes beyond the frisson of family gossip, the sentimentality of a compelling life story, or the romance of a storied place.

The recently released movie "The Monuments Men" tells of Hitler's attempt to steal or destroy Europe's greatest works of art, and the men FDR sent into harm's way to stop him. Thousands of works of art and many masterpieces were recovered and returned to their rightful owners. Yet today, seven decades after the fall of the Third Reich, other stolen works of art—some from owners who perished in the Holocaust—hang in museums in Europe and in America.

In the U.S., for instance, the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, Calif., is fighting a claim by Marei von Saher, heir of Jewish Dutch art dealer Jacques Goudstikker, whose collection was forcibly sold to the Nazis in 1940. The works in question are 16th-century oil paintings by Lucas Cranach. The museum has denied Ms. von Saher's claim on grounds that the statute of limitations on looted art has run out.

Art Detective is a ground-breaking initiative that connects public collections in search of information about their oil paintings with specialists and members of the public with relevant knowledge. Whether it is to discover the name of a beautiful 1930s society hostess or the artist behind a Dutch seventeenth- century still life, Art Detective will help collections put names to unidentified sitters, places and events depicted in their paintings and the unknown artists behind works.

Art Detective addresses the serious issue of insufficient – and declining – specialist knowledge within public art collections. It is available to all 3,000 or so collections that participate in Your Paintings, the website created by the PCF in partnership with the BBC. The vast majority of these participating collections – many of which are not museums – do not have fine art curators, whilst many have lost experienced curators through funding cuts over the years.

A unique scholarly institute devoted to Francis Bacon is to open in Monaco, where the painter drew inspiration from the light and landscape, as well as the principality's gambling dens and bars.

The idea of the wealthy Lebanese-born property developer Majid Boustany, the Francis Bacon MB Art Foundation's collection will bring together previously unseen photographs, oil paintings from the 1920s to the 1980s, and furniture and rugs from Bacon's spell as an interior designer. There will also be an extensive library open to scholars and members of the public by appointment.